Keeping Up Appearances: Why Fat People Make Less Money

For the past month I have been making the rounds on the interview circuit in anticipation of leaving my current job (more on this later). Last week I was relating the gritty details of each interview with a close friend and expressed my anxiety about receiving an offer from any one of the companies where I was interviewing. My friend responded with these words of reassurance:

“Don’t worry. You have what everyone is looking for in a co-worker: Looks and personality.”

We both laughed at the time, but later I began to wonder if his words didn’t have at least some kernel of truth to them.

How great a role does appearance really play in career success?

While physical appearance is not supposed to legally be a factor in whether or not to hire/promote a person, studies have shown that attractive people, on average, make more than their less attractive counterparts.

For example, a study highlighted in The Regional Economist reports that overweight or obese women are shown to earn significantly less than their thinner peers:

“Economists Susan Averett and Sanders Korenman studied the effects of obesity on wages, using a sample consisting of individuals aged 16-24 in 1981 who were 23-31 in 1988. They showed that women who were obese according to their Body Mass Index (BMI) in both 1981 and 1988 earned 17 percent lower wages on average than women within their recommended BMI range.”

Women are not the only ones to suffer discrimination based on appearance. While obesity had a slightly negative effect on a man’s earning power, height seems to play a much more significant role in determining a man’s salary, with shorter men getting the “short end of the stick.”

The study revealed the following:

“Economists Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlewaite and Dan Silverman tried to explain the origin of the “height premium.” They focused on white men to avoid possible discrimination based on gender or race. After controlling for a number of family characteristics that are generally correlated with both height and wages (parents’ education, parents’ occupation and number of siblings), they found that for white men in the United States, a 1.8-percent increase in wages accompanies every additional inch of height.”

While nothing short of plastic surgery can make you taller (or even thinner in some cases) exuding a polished, professional appearance can do wonders in how co-workers treat and perceive you at work. A recent column in Diversity Inc. does an excellent job of explaining the importance of following the corporate dress code:

“Corporate culture will reflect what is necessary to do business with the widest range of people. Since the United States has the largest gross domestic product (GDP) of any other single nation–almost four times as large as the next largest economy (Japan)–it is only natural that other nations adopted our dress code. Further, psychological tests show that we are predisposed to trust people who look just like us. That’s one reason sycophantic behavior is often successful.

Most human beings really don’t like change. Having a dress code simplifies the number of variables we all have to deal with. This creates a comfort level from which we can deal with what business is there to do: Be profitable.”

Some might argue that following a prescribed dress code, such as a suit and tie, is conformist, stifling, and reminiscent of a drone scurrying around a hive. However, what a suit and tie says to co-workers, bosses and clients alike is “Yes, I understand you–how you dress, how you think, what your needs are. You can relate to me and I to you.” And in business, this could mean the difference between getting that corner office or making that big sale.

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Related Reading:

• What does casual Friday attire say about your image?
• What Not To Wear
• Discrimination Continues Against the Obese

Stop Eyeing the Corner Office and Shoot for Another Cubicle to Get Ahead

I wrote a post about a month ago about how I feel that age, and the perceived lack of “experience” that accompanies it, tend to hold young professionals back from achieving their career advancement goals since many companies prefer to hire more “experienced”, external candidates rather than promote candidates from within. This is an idea I feel very strongly about and proved to provoke some heated debate from readers, most recommending I either stop feeling so entitled or move to another job to gain more respect and a bigger salary, perpetuating the very cycle I was hoping to break.

So I was surprised to come across an article in the Wall Street Journal advocating the benefits of “career-mobility” programs that formally asses an employees personal strengths and talents and helps them move between departments or positions within the company, even if they were initially hired to do something else. Talk about the ultimate in pro-active employee retention.

“Initiatives typically include Web-based programs for evaluating employees’ career goals and suggesting relevant paths. For example, IBM offers a skills-evaluation tool that recommends areas where an employee might be a strong fit. Charles Berta says the tool helped him decide to switch to human resources from consulting earlier this year, after he grew tired of traveling four days a week. “I reached a point where I felt as though it was time for a change,” he says.

Verizon provides competency and personality assessments, career-related courses, résumé-writing tips and a peer-review tool that lets workers seek feedback from supervisors and colleagues. “By going through a self-discovery process, you may find that your interests lie elsewhere,” says Michael Flanagan, senior staff consultant, leadership development, at Verizon.

Most companies urge employees to work with their supervisor, a company mentor or human-resources staffer to review the results and plan a career move. This may include identifying relevant job openings at the firm and strengthening needed skills.

Companies may reap benefits beyond reducing turnover, including improved productivity, says Ron Garonzik, a vice president at Hay Group Inc., a management-consulting firm.”

These types of programs are a great way for young workers to circumvent the career “ladder” by gaining work experience, making contacts and learning about different aspects of how the company works as a whole by working in different departments or fields, not to mention stay interested and challenged by their work. I also think employers benefit from employees who have a holistic view of the company, which is why I think rotational leadership programs and other types of mentoring or cross-departmental training programs are so important.

In today’s workplace, the days of 30-year jobs are gone—and so are concrete career paths to advancement. Brazen Careerist, Penelope Trunk, explains how straightforward career “ladders” are all but obsolete to young workers:

The entry-level job inherently undervalues someone who is bright and driven, according to Paul Graham, partner at Y Combinator, a Cambridge-based venture capital firm that funds startups almost exclusively from very young people. He sees entrepreneurship as the great escape.

“For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete,” says Graham. For the last hundred years everyone started out at the bottom. Even if the candidate held extreme promise, corporations put the candidate as a trainee on the bottom rung so he didn’t get a big head. Graham writes, “The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.”

These statements should be a wake-up call to employers that they do not have to accept losing talented people. By offering lateral, in addition to vertical, advancement opportunities, employers can keep workers engaged, continually learning and with a reduction in turnover, foster a better sense of community throughout the company.

How a Second Job Can Improve Your First One

A lot of the career advice floating around these days seems centered around helping folks find that “perfect” job that will lift them out of the misery of their current one.

But will a new job really provide a brand new life?

As a product of the “over-programmed” generation, I endured the constant shuttling from elementary school to after-school soccer practice, music lessons, French tutoring or worse, and every minute of my life had to serve a goal-oriented purpose—getting accepted to a good college. It seemed like most of my life revolved around school and a handful of extra-curricular activities. My circle of friends, my time, my efforts, my achievements were all enmeshed in this tightly-woven, carefully orchestrated world.

Upon reaching college however, I was presented with a unique challenge that I had never faced before: copious amounts of free time. If you google “college time management” you get over 19,700,000 results.

But how can someone who only goes to class 15 hours a week have time management issues?

As more and more children of my generation enter college and subsequently the workforce, we find ourselves unprepared for the lack of rigor in our lives. We are used to receiving structure, social connections and recognition from teachers, professors and our peers. Naturally, we transfer these expectations to our bosses and co-workers as we segue into the workforce.

So how do we feel when our bosses are too busy express recognition at our Herculean efforts and our co-workers would rather go home to their families than out to happy hour?

Lonely and kind of depressed.

Ryan Paugh over at Employee Evolution offers a solution in his post, You’ll Never Make it Big if Your Social Life Sucks:

Everyone seems to look up to people who get out of college and move into the city. Where I come from, New York is a big deal. And whenever someone gets a job and moves there, it’s like they have already become successful. There’s this glow about them that says, “Hey, I’m in NYC, I made it.”

It’s funny, because most of the people I know who have strolled into the city “living the dream” aren’t making that much money. Between rent, taxes, food and entertainment, some of them aren’t making anything at all.

The real success for these people is based on their social lives. The fact that they’re going out every weekend, meeting enormous amounts of people and feeling a sense of connection that a lot of people not in a large city miss out on.

But that’s not to say that you can’t make your social life work if you’re not in a city. You just have to try a lot harder.

But that’s a problem for a lot of people. After a long day, finding the physical and emotional energy to make a social life work can be frustrating. It’s a hell of a lot easier to sit on the couch, watch prime time television and go to sleep.

What I think Ryan is getting at is that we cannot allow our jobs to completely define us. No person can be fulfilled by just one aspect of their lives. It’s important to see yourself not just as a “programmer” or “banker” but also a “mountain biker,” “meals-on-wheels volunteer” or “celebrity-blogger.” It’s also essential to have a life outside of work to support you when things are stressful at the office.

It’s critical to explore your varied interests, desires and talents so that you can grow as a person and learn to be comfortable with yourself. These activities can also help build valuable job skills you wouldn’t get at your day job and also a wide network of contacts in other industries. While it takes work to try new things and meet new people, the rewards are invaluable.

Learning to see the person beyond the job description is not just a millennial issue. A recent article in the Seattle Times highlights the rising incidence of “multi-prong careers” among professionals holding a portfolio of several part-time jobs in different career fields.

A growing number of professionals…are opting out of the traditional one-job track. Instead, they are crafting a portfolio of careers comprising multiple part-time jobs that, when combined, are equivalent to a full-time position. The number of people pursuing these dual- or tri-track careers has doubled in the past couple of years, says John Challenger, president of the outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The types of people who craft portfolio careers are as diverse across age groups as they are across industries. This alternative approach to work isn’t just about cobbling together a patchwork of freelance gigs, but rather is a distinct career path that allows people to combine their interests and not be seriously penalized in the process.

While creating a “career portfolio” may be a bit extreme for most people, the message that pursuing multiple interests leads to high job as well as overall satisfaction is clear. These multi-career folks are proving that you cannot define a person by what they do from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.

So if you loathe the monotony of corporate life and want to feel more fullfilled, put down the want ads and consider taking a dance class or joining a co-rec sports team instead.