Didn't look at the study either but I think an important question is what causes the corelation. I guess many would jump to the conclusion that overweight women are less likely to get certain well-paid jobs because of their weight, but it's also possible that there's an underlying cause involved such as lack of self-discipline/self-confidence, and it's also possible that people who don't get certain well-paid jobs are more likely to gain weight.

I didn't look at the study either.

Call me a skeptic, but this article is probably manipulating/withholding information from the study to make the article more interesting. I'm fairly certain that they could have easily taken the gender out of the article and still came with the same conclusions.

But that would have been received with a universal, "Thank you Captain Obvious."

Overweight woman earn less because they worth less!
(Just making webdip female friendly)

"Call me a skeptic, but this article is probably manipulating/withholding information from the study to make the article more interesting."

If only there were some way we could verify the article accurately reflected the study...

Where could we possibly find that study though...

@abge - Done and done.

The title of the paper says it all

Oh wowwwww, you read the title. That says a lot.

It's a study conducted by an accredited professor at Vanderbilt. If you want to discredit it, you're going to have to try a lot harder than that.

So since we're all clearly too lazy to read any of it, care to tell us the important bits, bo_sox?

I can later this afternoon after class. I'm sure someone will have come around that has by then, but we'll see.

maybe ill do it in class 0_o

Till then, here's another related, gender-neutral study (much less official): http://tinyurl.com/o8rqpft

Look, another link no one will open.

I didn't read the entire study, but I read through the intro and the results and conclusion sections. The data seems convincing. The only significant deviation on the male side came in the underweight section (probably due to the people in that group being younger) and the overweight section (I have no reasoning for this). Even then, the gross difference between the overweight section on the men side was only about $2 while on the women side both obese and morbidly obese fell significantly outside the statistically significant mark (with overweight just barely falling short of qualification)

I did not check the sample strategy to see if it was sound, but I'm assuming the author would have thought about that if some undergraduate student did, so I'll assume it's solid.

There could be intervening variables here, which only serves as further proof that correlation does not equal causation.

For example, I don't see fat chicks working on crab boats or construction sites, both of which are relatively well-paying blue collar jobs. Furthermore, could it be that low-paying female-oriented jobs tend to be sedentary?

I'm not gonna lie, I only half understand what the author did to get the data. Apparently she cross referenced data from several different databases which took into account "weight, height, demographic characteristics, employment status, real hourly wages in 2008 dollars, six measures of personal interaction occupational characteristics, and seven measures of physical activity occupational characteristics." (p.12-13) Again, I'm not able to confirm the validity of the cross reference, but according to her it's a valid system. I did check up on the information that the databases she used provided, and from what I saw it seemed representative.