Via xoJane, a recent study from Jennifer Bennett Shinall at Vanderbilt University suggests that heavier women earn less even when social factors like education are controlled for. More specifically, the results suggest both that heavier women are less likely to occupy certain financially lucrative roles and that they are less well paid when they do occupy those roles. Here’s the abstract:
This paper demonstrates that accounting for two key occupational characteristics eliminates the unexplained wage gap experienced by the heaviest women in the labor market. Obese women are less likely to work in jobs that emphasize personal interaction, but they are more likely to work in jobs that emphasize physical activity. Although jobs that emphasize personal interaction are higher paying, obese women who work in such jobs receive lower wages than non-obese women, and their wage penalty offsets the premium to working in a job emphasizing personal interaction. Together, these results suggest that taste-based discrimination may be driving occupational sorting among obese women and, as a result, is at least one source of the wage penalty experienced by obese women.