Shine OnOverweight grad school applicants less likely to be admitted, says study
When it comes to getting into grad school, your body size may play a bigger role than your resume, suggests a U.S. study from Bowling Green State University.
This latest study dealing with weight bias looked at 97 grad school applicants who applied to psychology graduate programs at more than 950 universities in the United States.
"We could see a clear relation between their weight and offers of admission for those applicants who had had an in-person interview," says study co-author Jacob Burmeister.
Students started out with comparable grades, test scores and letters of recommendations, but after an in-person interview, researchers found those with a high body mass index (BMI) were 27 per cent less likely to be offered admission than their trimmer co-applicants, which suggests that weight may be a deciding factor for these universities.
However, when researchers looked at the success rates for phone-only interviews, they found no difference in admission rates between heavy and slim candidates, serving only to strengthen the study's findings.
Also see: Too attractive to be an engineer? LinkedIn thinks so
"One of the things we suspected was the quality of their letters of recommendation written by their undergrad mentors would be associated with the applicants' body weight, but it really wasn't," says Burmeister. Overweight applicants were just as likely to get good letters of recommendations than thin applicants.
Burmeister attributes "fat bias" -- the assumption that overweight people are lazy or undisciplined -- as one of the reasons for the study results.
"We know that these kinds of biases are pretty common and even somewhat acceptable compared to other biases, and there's not much legally forbidding it," he says.
The researchers also speculate that overweight candidates may perform poorly during interviews because their weight lowers their confidence or makes them uncomfortable.
Also see: Not thin and beautiful? Abercrombie & Fitch doesn't want you
Another U.S. study publish last month suggests that weight-based discrimination can even cause weight gain. Average weight people who reported facing discrimination were 2.5 times more likely to become obese in the four-year study period, and people who started out obese were three times more likely to remain so if they were discriminated against.
And according to large U.S. study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2011, women who are 25 lbs. below average weight make an additional $15,572 each year than their heavier counterparts. However, men who are 25 lbs. below the average weight make $8,437 less each year.
What are your thoughts on the "fat bias?" How strongly do you think it factors when interviewing for university admission or a job? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
