Archive for September, 2016
9/29/16, Fortune, Donald Trump’s Fat Shaming Reflects Weight-Based Prejudice in the Workplace, by Kristen Bahler
Implicit bias keeps overweight women from advancing at the same pace as their coworkers, says Linda Bacon, PhD, a health professor at the City College of San Francisco and author of the book Body Respect. “A lot of judgments happen,” she says. “There’s this assumption that they’re lazy, they lack character or willpower.” Those assumptions are wrong, she says, but they give thinner people an advantage when it comes to promotions. “Often, when two people are in the same position, with the same experience, the thinner one gets the raise,” she says.
Link to article9/18/16, BBC News, Should Donald Trump’s weight be an election issue?, by Brian Wheeler
“Knowing Trump’s BMI tells me nothing about his health but making a judgement about Trump’s BMI tells us a lot about bias,” says Dr Linda Bacon, author of Body Respect and Health at Every Size. She argues that BMI is a “lousy indicator” of general health but does add to the stigma… “There are plenty of thin people who get the diseases we blame on weight, and plenty of people labelled overweight and obese that live long, disease-free lives. Research shows that if we diagnosed people based on weight, we’d be wrong at least half the time.” She adds: “I don’t think that weight should be a defining factor, either for the Presidency or in life.”
Link to article