You don't say!

Filed under the heading "your great aunt Tillie could have told you that" comes the finding in a study headed by Dalton Conley, a sociologist at NYU, that

[w]eight can have startling consequences for women's financial well-being, careers, and marriage prospects, according to research that found that women ... suffer economic harm from being overweight.

The first-of-its-kind study found that the heavier the woman, the worse her financial situation will be 13 to 15 years in the future.

In fact, the effect of weight on women's fortunes was so strong, that women with high school diplomas will have the same future household income as women with a four-year college degree but who weigh twice as much, according to the study. ...

"This is one of the core fundamental bases of gender inequality in the United States. Women are held to standards of objectified physical appearance that men are not," [Conley said.]

That women are held to different standards than men, that their physical attractiveness has great significance for how they are judged, is old stuff, well-established and questioned only by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo of sexism. In fact, the emphasis on a woman's appearance is such that when she is part of a couple, her attractiveness has a great deal to do with how they are seen as a unit: an average-looking man is thought more attractive when his female partner is more attractive and less so when she is less so.

What is new about the study is that it expresses that difference in a way that shows clear, measurable harm - not even psychological harm of the kind at which right-wingers love to sneer ("Aw, were her feelings hurt? Poor baby!") but actual, countable, dollars and cents harm, a form of harm even they have to recognize.

However, there was another finding that did surprise me:

For men, extra weight had no impact on their earnings, careers, or marriage prospects.

If they'd found a smaller impact, even a dramatically smaller one, I would have said "of course." But the finding that there was no impact, that is, saying in effect that there is no discrimination against overweight men as compared to "normal" weight men strikes me as very questionable. For one thing, the tendency of men to put more emphasis on appearance applies not only to their view of women but to their view of themselves.

[M]en believe an attractive face is more important to women than empathy and the ability to talk about feelings. They also put more emphasis on body build than women do. In general, men judge their physique to be more important than women do.

And the fact that attractive people are held in higher regard than less attractive people has been established by multiple studies. For one thing, all else being equal, physically attractive people are more likely to be hired for jobs than unattractive people (although the effect weakens in the case of equivalent but very high quality resumes). What's more,

[p]eople routinely guess that physically attractive people are smarter, more successful, more sociable, more dominant, sexually warmer, have better mental health, and have higher self esteem than their physically unattractive counterparts.

So while I find the result for women to be what would be expected given our biases based on appearance, I admit to being unconvinced that fat men suffer no economic ill-effects due to prejudice.