I read an excerpt about this book in the Sunday Times a few weeks ago and thought that I would share.
During the course of finding info on Ms. Rhodes' book - came across this interesting study find...
"discrimination based purely on cosmetic aversion to fat is totally legal. In one study, 43% of overweight women reported feeling stigmatized by their employers. Obese women earn 12% less than their thinner counterparts with comparable qualifications. Obese women are more likely to live in poverty, even after controlling for other factors."
"Fat chance: It's not easy for obese workers
Overweight workers face increasingly harsh climate in workplace"
Source
MSNBC
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Looksism and the law
May 24th 2010, 15:17 by M.S.
DEBORAH RHODE, a law professor at Stanford, has a new book out, "The Beauty Bias", on appearance-based discrimination and the law, which Emily Bazelon reviewed in the New York Times this weekend. Clearly, such discrimination is pervasive and unfair, and just as clearly, there's no way to eliminate it. (Imagine the Stephen Colbert line: "I don't see appearances." Er...) But while it can't be eliminated, it can be mitigated a bit. Ms Rhodes says Michigan and six locales have laws against appearance discrimination, and the result has been not a flood of frivolous litigation but a few suits in egregious cases. Michigan averages 30 complaints per year, with about one per year going to court; and it certainly seems reasonable that, for example, a nursing student should not be kicked out of school for being obese. (Maureen Tkacik referred to an equally deserving case last week in Columbia Journalism Review, in which executives at Abercrombie & Fitch held weekly reviews to ogle surveillance photos of new entry-level retail employees and fire the ones who didn't meet their fancy. Though that class-action suit focused chiefly on racial and gender discrimination.)
Matt Zeitlin, however, thinks Ms Rhodes's remedy for a few egregious cases doesn't do much about the overall problem of clear, quantifiable discrimination against large women and short men.
For example, we know from our good friend Greg Mankiw, that tall people can expect a substantial earnings premium over shorter people on account of their height. We also know that, in general, the stuff that people get rewarded forhaving wealthy, well educated parents; genes that make them tall; well proportioned facial features and so onhave, in themselves, no real moral content and thus peoples claims to the goods gained due to these features are weaker than they think they are. But the disparities exist anyway, and are probably too deeply entrenched to be redressed through discrimination suits. So this just leaves us with, to evoke Yglesias, higher taxes to finance more and better public services.
At first this sounded a little off-point to me: how is improving bus service a meet and just response to people getting fired because they're overweight? But in fact people who ride the bus tend to be disproportionately overweight, in some measure because people who ride the bus tend to be poor, and overweight people are more likely to be poor, in part because they are discriminated against in the workplace. You didn't get promoted at Abercrombie & Fitch, so you can't afford a car, so you're riding the bus. This obviously isn't the only or the most important reason why people don't get promoted, just as being tall isn't the main reason people become rich; but it's demonstrably a factor. And if you're in a society where you have trouble getting ahead because you're not attractive, and hence have to use public services, then improving those public services will make your life substantially more pleasant and less unequal-seeming. In other words, society is unequal and unfair, and we can't always get rid of the unfairness, so we ought, within reason, to try and reduce the inequality.
This approach may mitigate the suffering inflicted by looksism. But it doesn't address the other part of the problem: the degree of discrimination and its cultural roots. America is a more looks-obsessed society than many others (though not as bad as, say, Venezuela), and it is more looks-obsessed today than it was fifty years ago, or even ten; plastic surgery has quadrupled this decade. The frontal assault on beauty culture seems to have failed, as Ms Bazelon writes: "It does no good to urge women to sally forth in sensible flat shoes while their hair grays and their faces prune. Feminists learned long ago that taking this line only makes enemies." (For that matter, it's not clear that this is non-discriminatory: some people gray later than others, and some look better than others in flat shoes.) But there must be some cultural resources available to combat superficial prejudice and cruelty. If social collective action and public-health initiatives just aren't up to this task, maybe we have to fall back on religion. Religions' hostility to body-based discrimination is often expressed as a hostility to the body and sexuality as such, which has an unfortunate tendency to make people feel guilty about things they can't help. But if we really can't help discriminating on the basis of appearances, the least we can do is feel guilty about it.
One more thing that doesn't quite fit into the rest of the post: from the 1970s through the 1990s, appearance discrimination, if anyone had thought to phrase it that way, would have been treated largely as an aspect of sexism or racism. In the past ten years, we've started to think about it at least as much in terms of obesity and body-image issues. It's interesting to think about how that changes the conversation
During the course of finding info on Ms. Rhodes' book - came across this interesting study find...
"discrimination based purely on cosmetic aversion to fat is totally legal. In one study, 43% of overweight women reported feeling stigmatized by their employers. Obese women earn 12% less than their thinner counterparts with comparable qualifications. Obese women are more likely to live in poverty, even after controlling for other factors."
"Fat chance: It's not easy for obese workers
Overweight workers face increasingly harsh climate in workplace"
Source
MSNBC
----------------------------------------------------------
Looksism and the law
May 24th 2010, 15:17 by M.S.
DEBORAH RHODE, a law professor at Stanford, has a new book out, "The Beauty Bias", on appearance-based discrimination and the law, which Emily Bazelon reviewed in the New York Times this weekend. Clearly, such discrimination is pervasive and unfair, and just as clearly, there's no way to eliminate it. (Imagine the Stephen Colbert line: "I don't see appearances." Er...) But while it can't be eliminated, it can be mitigated a bit. Ms Rhodes says Michigan and six locales have laws against appearance discrimination, and the result has been not a flood of frivolous litigation but a few suits in egregious cases. Michigan averages 30 complaints per year, with about one per year going to court; and it certainly seems reasonable that, for example, a nursing student should not be kicked out of school for being obese. (Maureen Tkacik referred to an equally deserving case last week in Columbia Journalism Review, in which executives at Abercrombie & Fitch held weekly reviews to ogle surveillance photos of new entry-level retail employees and fire the ones who didn't meet their fancy. Though that class-action suit focused chiefly on racial and gender discrimination.)
Matt Zeitlin, however, thinks Ms Rhodes's remedy for a few egregious cases doesn't do much about the overall problem of clear, quantifiable discrimination against large women and short men.
For example, we know from our good friend Greg Mankiw, that tall people can expect a substantial earnings premium over shorter people on account of their height. We also know that, in general, the stuff that people get rewarded forhaving wealthy, well educated parents; genes that make them tall; well proportioned facial features and so onhave, in themselves, no real moral content and thus peoples claims to the goods gained due to these features are weaker than they think they are. But the disparities exist anyway, and are probably too deeply entrenched to be redressed through discrimination suits. So this just leaves us with, to evoke Yglesias, higher taxes to finance more and better public services.
At first this sounded a little off-point to me: how is improving bus service a meet and just response to people getting fired because they're overweight? But in fact people who ride the bus tend to be disproportionately overweight, in some measure because people who ride the bus tend to be poor, and overweight people are more likely to be poor, in part because they are discriminated against in the workplace. You didn't get promoted at Abercrombie & Fitch, so you can't afford a car, so you're riding the bus. This obviously isn't the only or the most important reason why people don't get promoted, just as being tall isn't the main reason people become rich; but it's demonstrably a factor. And if you're in a society where you have trouble getting ahead because you're not attractive, and hence have to use public services, then improving those public services will make your life substantially more pleasant and less unequal-seeming. In other words, society is unequal and unfair, and we can't always get rid of the unfairness, so we ought, within reason, to try and reduce the inequality.
This approach may mitigate the suffering inflicted by looksism. But it doesn't address the other part of the problem: the degree of discrimination and its cultural roots. America is a more looks-obsessed society than many others (though not as bad as, say, Venezuela), and it is more looks-obsessed today than it was fifty years ago, or even ten; plastic surgery has quadrupled this decade. The frontal assault on beauty culture seems to have failed, as Ms Bazelon writes: "It does no good to urge women to sally forth in sensible flat shoes while their hair grays and their faces prune. Feminists learned long ago that taking this line only makes enemies." (For that matter, it's not clear that this is non-discriminatory: some people gray later than others, and some look better than others in flat shoes.) But there must be some cultural resources available to combat superficial prejudice and cruelty. If social collective action and public-health initiatives just aren't up to this task, maybe we have to fall back on religion. Religions' hostility to body-based discrimination is often expressed as a hostility to the body and sexuality as such, which has an unfortunate tendency to make people feel guilty about things they can't help. But if we really can't help discriminating on the basis of appearances, the least we can do is feel guilty about it.
One more thing that doesn't quite fit into the rest of the post: from the 1970s through the 1990s, appearance discrimination, if anyone had thought to phrase it that way, would have been treated largely as an aspect of sexism or racism. In the past ten years, we've started to think about it at least as much in terms of obesity and body-image issues. It's interesting to think about how that changes the conversation
