No plus-size lab coats, weight and diet talk in the workplace -- stigma against fatness is everywhere, and science is no exception
The impacts of implicit bias on factors such as hiring, firing, tenure, promotion and salary decisions are well documented. However, other, more subtle, practices make science less welcoming to fat people.
Not all weight bias is subtle. In 2013, a Twitterstorm erupted when Geoffrey Miller, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, tweeted that if obese people didn’t have the willpower to give up carbohydrates, they would never have the willpower to finish their PhD dissertation. Pausé was infuriated, but not surprised.
“I’ve had to work harder to be an advocate for my own care as a patient because I am fat and Black and a woman,” she says. As a young computer programmer, Tyrol had come straight from her undergraduate studies to work at a small, private company. She soon realized that the professional world showed a distinct preference for bodies that conformed to various social rules: they had light skin, they were thin , they styled their hair a certain way and wore the ‘right’ clothes. Tyrol didn’t fit in with those norms — and didn’t feel that she should.