Overweight and Older Woman Face Huge Employment Bias

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Overweight and Older Woman Face Huge Employment Bias

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Human resources departments and employees who make hiring decisions are not supposed to pick new workers on the basis of race, color or creed. That usually also extends to weight and age. However, these two groups are at a distinct disadvantage when they look for jobs.

Researchers from “Fairygodboss” showed a series of photos to 500 “hiring professionals.” The first conclusion from the data was that among the photos, in the one with the heaviest looking woman the potential candidate was considered “lazy” by 21% of the professionals. Only 15.6% said they would hire her.

Older women fared nearly as badly. Only 29.2% hiring professionals shown a picture of an older women responded that would hire this candidate. This was the case despite the fact that older women were considered “leadership material” and “reliable.”

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The problem, particularly for the obese, is confounded by the fact that they may not always have recourse, in the case where their obesity is caused by a medical condition. Above The Law recently pointed out:

We’ve already mentioned that 49 states and virtually every locality in the US permit weight bias, i.e., do not consider weight a protected class, or prohibit discrimination based solely upon weight.

Leave the fact that, if women can’t or don’t want to lose weight, they are in trouble. A shame.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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