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Apr 17

Can Body Shaming Be Outlawed? – The New York Times

Lose Weight Comments Off on Can Body Shaming Be Outlawed? – The New York Times

But had we really swayed far enough in the other direction, toward genuine acceptance, away from the view that a low body mass index was something to venerate? Fat activists believe that we have not, which is why there are proposed laws in the New York City Council as well as in the State Legislature that would make weight (and height) discrimination illegal, particularly as it relates to employment and housing(exceptions would be made for certain occupations).

Whatever progress has been made, prejudice against the overweight has hardly been eliminated. Four years ago, researchers at Harvard published a study in the journal Psychological Science that looked at data from four million tests taken between 2004 and 2016 examining long-term changes in attitude toward historically marginalized groups. The study found that while explicit bias against the overweight had decreased by 15 percent, this represented a much slower decline than similar shifts in attitude toward gays and lesbians, where the figure was 49 percent. This may be because, unlike race or sexual orientation, weight is thought of as mutable. The only barrier to losing it, presumably, is a weakness of will.

Business leaders, who point to higher health care costs for obese workers, have predictably expressed concern that legislation of the kind under consideration would unduly burden the courts because of all the resulting litigation. In truth, these cases are very hard to push forward. We know this because Michigan has had a weight discrimination law on the books since the mid-1970s. (The state of Washington, the only one to have followed, added added its own law a few years ago.)

Recently, Jon Marko, a civil rights lawyer in Detroit, laid out the odds. Most of the time there is not direct evidence of bias, and while the Michigan law allows for circumstantial evidence to be brought in as well, that is amuch harder route to building a case. Direct evidence might be an employer who says, Oh, sweetie, you need to lose some weight before you can get that promotion, Mr. Marko told me. That is rare. Sometimes a weight case can be embedded in a harassment case, and those are more promising. Mr. Marko offered the example of a boss in the habit of squeezing a subordinates love handles.

At the level of federal law, weight is not a protected category. Still, in 1992, flight attendants sued United Airlines on the basis that its weight requirements were too restrictive the maximum weight for a 30-year-old, 5-foot-7 woman, for example, was 142 pounds. United wound up abandoning these rules altogether two years later, because the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed that the complaint was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination on the grounds of race, religion and sex. Men working in the same capacity at United were subject to more forgiving standards.

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Can Body Shaming Be Outlawed? - The New York Times

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