Overweight men at work are perceived more persuasive at work compared to their thinner colleagues, according to a new study at Cornell University.
However, the study entitled "'Big men' in the office: The gender-specific
influence of weight upon persuasiveness" pointed out that overweight female employees do not receive the same attention.
“In contrast with research that highlights the stigma that is commonly associated with being overweight, we ... find that the anthropological concept of ‘big men’ can carry literal meaning,” study authors Kevin M. Kniffin, Vicki L. Bogan and David R. Just stated.
Researchers from Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management revealed that people find terms like "heavyweight,” “gravitas,” and “not being a pushover” positive.
Findings suggest that being overweight signifies leadership traits like persuasiveness.
Participants also agreed that people with “gravitas” were more likely to be overweight, but not obese.
“While the ‘big man’ leadership concept is based on studies of pre-industrial societies where weight embodied status, our findings suggest an evolved bias to favor moderately big men–with respect to perceived persuasiveness–even in environments where there is no reason to interpret over-consumption of food and conservation of energy as a signal of wealth," the researchers wrote.
Not overweight women
While overweight and obese men were regarded as persuasive workers, females with big bodies received low scores when it comes to persuasiveness. This emerged after respondents rated drawings of men and women of various body sizes. They evaluated them based on how persuasive they expected the person to be.
Kniffin told HuffPost in an interview that “biases in relation to being relatively big” have “opposite impacts for women and men,” possibly because women “carry the extra burden of societal expectations of physical beauty.”
“Most generally, while weight–and height–have obvious relevance for work that involves physical activity, there is no clear reason why weight per se should directly impact the performance of people engaged in non-manual labor such as political service (e.g., Governor or President)," the researchers concluded.
"In that respect, employers should be particularly sensitive to the varied ways in which weight colors their perceptions of people with regard to hiring and promotion decisions.”
