Negative stereotypes of overweight and obese people are not necessarily true and shouldn’t affect the hiring process, according to a study done by researchers from MSU and Hope College.
“The bottom line is that employers need to be concerned, given evidence that there is weight bias in the workplace, that they are making invalid decisions based on weight stereotypes,” said Mark Roehling, an MSU associate professor of human resource management.
“Not only does this have potential legal implications, but reliance on unfounded stereotypes involves a waste of human resources.”
In the past, the stereotypes have been found to hurt those workers in the areas of hiring, promotion and firing. A 2006 Yale’s Rudd Center For Food Policy and Obesity study found that 43 percent of 2,400 overweight and obese adult subjects felt they had experienced weight bias from employers and/or supervisors.
The recent research combined two separate studies, which compared different health measurements of people with personality test results in four areas that obese and overweight people are negatively stereotyped: Conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and whether they are introverted or extroverted.
Roehling said that the general results of the study showed that there was no significant relationship between a person’s body weight and their personality traits. Roehling got involved in his research to examine whether stereotypes about overweight and obese people in the office were true.
“The basic issue was that there are always negative stereotypes about obese people about the personality traits, and there is a great body of research that shows these stereotypes, but there is hardly any research that examines the validity of the stereotypes,” Roehling said.
Art history senior Katie Wiktorski said overweight and obese people should not be discriminated against in the workplace.
“If you discriminate because of their race or gender, those are things that people can’t change, so people might try to justify discriminating against people because of their weight, but I think that any kind of discrimination is not right, especially in the workplace,” Wiktorski said.
Barb Strong, a registered dietitian and owner of Nutrition Resources Inc., 1086 Trails End in Okemos, said that employers should focus on aiding overweight and obese employees, rather than looking down on them.
“What I would propose that an employer do is worry about the health problems such as diabetes, coronary problems, and gout, and try to help them out with that,” Strong said. “It is a very positive way to help out your employee. A lot of these people already feel bad, and shame just makes you feel worse.”
Roehling said that the first thing he would tell employers to do is follow sound scientific human resource practices, rather than stereotypes.
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