The Challenge and Necessity of Talking About Weight at Work

Abstract

The topic of weight at work is challenging to discuss because of strong cultural, medical, and social ideas about what health means, how body size relates to work capacity, and the malleability of weight. Yet people in larger-sized bodies report economic and interpersonal mistreatment at work at alarming rates. This necessitates that employers begin thinking more deeply about the lived experiences of their larger-bodied workers. To aid their consideration, this article describes how the objectification of body size creates a situation where judgment and punishment of people based on their body size is normalized, and how victims of weight-focused mistreatment rarely speak about their experiences because they feel in some way deserving of their mistreatment. When the objectification process is better understood, employers stand ready to make more precise and meaningful changes to how they approach the problem of weight stigma at work, and entry points for this change are discussed here.