Effects Of Discrimination On Overweight People

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For as long as I can remember, I was the overweight girl within my group of friends. I did not really start to notice the effect it had on my life until I reached middle school. All of my friends received compliments, the attention of boys, and everyone treated them genuinely better compared to me. For me, I was the girl standing on the sideline, getting no attention and receiving pity compliments. These actions do not just apply to overweight middle school girls like I was. Overweight children, men, and women all over the world face the daily struggle of people judging them by the way they look. It is as though people think they can judge what is on the inside of a person by how attractive their physical appearance is. Even though someone’s …show more content…
Overweight children feel as though they are picked last for teams in their physical education class, just like overweight men and women feel as though they are chosen last for jobs. Louise Bleakley, reporter for New Zealand’s The Press, notes that a recent poll of British recruitment professionals conducted a survey which suggests that overweight people lack self-discipline, are less productive, and should not expect to get a job as easily as slim people. It is shocking that recruitment professionals assume that overweight people lack self-discipline and are less productive based on their weight. The physical appearance of a person should have nothing to do with the application process nor the assumption of his job execution abilities. The same survey of 2000 human resource professionals in the UK journal Personnel Today revealed “anti-fat attitudes were rife among staff, with more than 90 percent saying they would favor a ‘normal weight’ candidate over an overweight person, even if they were equally qualified” (Bleakley). Both of these allegations referring to candidate choices for jobs are based on physical appearance. Neither state looking at references or even considering the application, thus concluding that looks do matter. With overweight people, their beauty is pushed aside because they don’t have a particular physical image that a company is looking for. Even if the overweight person is …show more content…
Rejection is something overweight people deal with every day because physical appearance matters and apparently in many eyes, overweight is not beautiful. A ten-year longitudinal study conducted by Markus H. Schafer and Kenneth F. Ferraro, professors from Purdue University, tests the hypothesis of whether perceptions of weight discrimination shape weight perceptions in social situations and examine how perceived weight based discrimination influences identity. The study concludes that only seven percent of overweight men and women felt as though they were not discriminated against, meaning they did not feel put down or awkward in any situation (77). The remainder of the overweight respondents in the study, ninety-three percent, said they received discriminatory attitudes toward them discrimination (78). This ten-year study also illustrates how weight based discrimination made the men or women feel inadequate in social situations, therefore proving that overweight people are initially judged and treated unfairly in social situations, as opposed to slimmer

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