Very overweight people are off to a bad start when looking for a job, according to an experimental study by the University of Tübingen’s Professor Ansgar Thiel, head of Sports Science, and Professor Stephan Zipfel, specialist in psychosomatics in the Psychology Department. Along with Dr. Katrin Giel and Manuela Alizadeh, they surveyed 127 experienced human resource professionals to ascertain their attitude to obese applicants. “We wanted to find out if there were prejudices among trained HR professionals against obese people,” says Dr. Katrin Giel, who led the project. The HR professionals were shown six photographs of people around the same age, of comparable socio-economic status, but of different body mass index. All were dressed alike in a white t-shirt and jeans.

The participants were told to guess what profession the six people had, and were able to select from a list of possible choices. They were also asked to name the candidates likely to be selected for a job as a departmental head. “The results of our study are clear,” says Giel. “In both cases, those who were overweight did badly. They were hardly ever entrusted with a high-prestige job, nor were they chosen for a head of department post.”

The prejudice against the overweight was particularly strong in the case of women. “Only two percent of those surveyed matched the obese women in the pictures with a prestigious profession. And only about six percent of respondents thought that they would be among the final choices for the head of department position” said Professor Ansgar Thiel, summarizing a focal result. A comparison with representative data on the distribution of professions by the German Health Survey shows that the HR professionals underestimate by far the professional career prospects of obese people. “The actual proportion of overweight men in prestigious careers in Germany is more than five times higher than the estimation in our experiment, and for women, the proportion is nearly eight times as high.” The proportion of women of normal weight in management positions was overestimated by the respondents. Katrin Giel ascribes this to an awareness of political correctness in the minds of those surveyed with regard to gender equality, but not with regard to obesity as a disadvantaging factor.

The results of the study are highly relevant, according to Professor Stephan Zipfel: “Personnel deci-sion-makers are usually much better trained than ordinary people to make their decisions without prejudice. And yet, in this experiment, they consider the obese far less able to live up to leadership positions than they do in reality.” Zipfel says this reflects the unconscious prejudices of HR profes-sionals toward the obese, particularly as there was in this case no other information for their as-sessment than the photographs.

The Tübingen researchers say their results are a clear signal that not only must there be a greater effort made in the battle against obesity, but that more effort is also needed to prevent the stigmati-zation of the obese. They say an important step is to exclude photographs from job applications – as has been the norm in the English-speaking world for many years – to promote equal opportunities. “Otherwise,” says Thiel, “the application process will probably be over for very overweight candidates before it has truly begun.”

The study is published in the journal BMC Public Health. It was run under the auspices of the Uni-versity of Tübingen’s interdisciplinary research group WissenschaftsCampus, initiated by the Leibniz Association’s Knowledge Media Research Center and Tübingen University. The Wissen-schaftscampus pools expertise on Empirical Education Research from the fields of Psychology, Sociology, Education, Computer Science, Sports Science, Economics, Ethics and Medicine in eleven clusters with 29 smaller projects.