Thin and Rich: It Means More Than You Think!

Pennies from the God of Small Things

Ok, now it’s personal. It’s one thing to spend one’s adolescence and young-adulthood (and middle-adulthood? possibly) feeling inadequate because one isn’t thin enough. At least—best-case scenario—one wises up, realizes there’s more to life than a dress size, makes peace with one’s thighs, and goes on to embrace the important things. By which I mean those little things like work, family, and friends, the elements that together constitute what is known as Real Life.

Now comes news that the most material of these three—work—the endeavor that makes the comforts of friends and family possible, is in thrall to (surprise!) thinness. A rather horrifying study has shown that the skinnier women are, the more money they earn.

Here is the price that is placed on emaciation: women who are 25 pounds below average weight take home an additional $15,572 per year. That will buy you more than a few Skimpy Treats. The researchers estimated that over the course of a 25-year career, an average-weight woman will earn $389,300 less than a woman who is 25 pounds lighter.

Granted, the basic idea here isn’t that much of a shock, I suppose. Women are rewarded for being thin. But here’s the part that’s particularly hard to get one’s head around: The exact opposite is true for men. Not only do thinner men earn less than heftier guys, but men who are 25 pounds heavier than average earn more than normal-weight men--$8,437 more per year.

Yes, I hear you howling, braying at the indifferent universe. Women already earn less than men overall; not to raise your blood pressure too precipitously, but since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 the wage gap between men and women has been steadily closing at an astonishing (to a snail, anyway) rate of half-a-penny a year. In 2009 women still were earning only 77% of what men earn. Now we have this other, infuriating ingredient. It’s not enough to work our asses off—our asses also have to be considerably smaller than other women’s asses, and way smaller than those of men, who are being rewarded in cold hard cash for eating dessert.

The researchers hypothesize that the pay difference may be due to the fact that people who conform to others’ ideas of the ideal body (i.e., women should be thin, men should be solid) actually perform better on the job. And why would that be? Because, they write, “employees are more able to influence others and get things accomplished when they conform to the media’s ideal body form.”

That seems like a huge leap to take. I’ll be a better magazine editor and get promoted, with a spiraling salary to match, if my super-thin body makes me more able to “influence others” and “get the job done”? While I’m sitting at my desk editing an article (and craving but not eating a candy bar)? Please. I would ask those particular researchers not to insult our collective intelligence.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this disheartening monetary development is simply another expression of a very old paradigm: that the world is much more comfortable when women are small—in every sense of the word—and men are large. That configuration conveys to us, at a very basic level, that all is right in the cosmos. When we redesign that pattern, when women become larger, take up more space, consume more of the good stuff, it throws a lot of people off. How do you control that out-of-control feeling? By convincing women that what they should really covet isn’t necessarily a big corner office but a tiny body—if possible, a Size Zero body. Can’t get much smaller than a zero. If she buys in to the shrinkage, heck, we’ll give her a raise! She’s working hard to be thin!

The dynamics of the whole small/large, diminishing/expanding question are, pardon the expression, huge, and worthy of much more exploration. Check in for further updates here. But meanwhile, what I do know is this: I don’t want my livelihood—and my kids’ college education—to depend on the size of my tush.