Does it really pay to be fat?

Mike Dang  |  08:46 PM, Wednesday, August 10, 2011

I recently came across two, interesting — if not infuriating — studies about the culture surrounding our BMI levels.

The first was a study discussed in Scientific American called "Marriages are more satisfying when women are thinner than their husbands." You can tell from the title what this study is arguing: When controlling for depression, income, education and divorce, researchers found that women were more happy with their marriage if they stayed thin, and husbands were more satisfied if they married thin. Overweight husbands didn't have an impact on marriage satisfaction.

The second study was discussed by Dalhousie University professor Marina Adshade in Big Think, which argues that single, overweight women earn higher wages because they invest in "unobservable skills" to help them along in their careers because they have to plan on never having a husband to help them pay their bills. You read that right: Overweight women are earning more money so that they can have the same luxuries of dual-income households, or perhaps make them more desirable based on their income bracket.

The study showed the inverse for men: Heavier single men are paid less, while heavier married men are paid more, because of this theory: while weight doesn't prevent men from marrying, it might encourage them to work harder to provide their wives with worldly comforts and to make up for the fact that they don't look like all the buff, attractive men on TV.

Professor Kate Clancy from the University of Illinois shot down the notion that happy marriages meant thin wives. The subjects of that study were mostly white, she points out, and different cultures have different ideas about what is beautiful, and yes, that includes women with a little more heft (see: here).

As for this idea that overweight women earn more to compensate for the fact that they won't marry and won't benefit from a dual income, read that line again and consider how ridiculous that sounds. Who says these women even want to get married?

And thin, single women can be as equally overachieving — here's a study by the Journal of Applied Psychology that shows women who are 25 pounds below average weight earn an additional $15,572 a year.

So how about a new study that looks at what people are doing to earn more money, that's not based on what they look like?