HEAVIER American white women earn less than their skinny peers—even
when their education, employment experience and IQ are taken into account. John
Cawley, an economist at Cornell University, studied nearly 3000 women aged 18 to
40, and found that white women who weighed 29 kilograms more earned about 7 per
cent less than colleagues of average weight. However, their probability of
getting a job was unaffected, he told the Robert Wood Johnson Conference on the
politics of obesity in Burlington, Vermont. Surprisingly, “a healthy white
[overweight] woman seems to earn less than an underweight woman,” says Cawley.
But workplace discrimination is unlikely to be the only reason, as black and
Hispanic women are unaffected by the trend. One possibility is that white women
are more susceptible to having a negative body image and don’t have the
confidence to demand more.
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