Obesity and hiring discrimination

Raymundo Campos-Vazquez and Eva Gonzalez

Economics & Human Biology, 2020, vol. 37, issue C

Abstract: We implement a correspondence audit study that uses a non-paired design to test the effect of obesity on employment discrimination in Mexico. In Mexico it is common practice to include a photograph in a resume, and job advertisements often specify personal and physical characteristics. We use both types of information to evaluate discrimination against the obese and identify its potential channels. We send two fictitious resumes, one of a woman and another of a man, one obese and the other non-obese, in response to advertisements for job openings. The obese photograph is a digital manipulation of the picture of the same non-obese person. We send a total of 3202 resumes in response to 1696 job advertisements. There is clear evidence of discrimination against obese women, but not obese men. The callback rate for the non-obese women is 29.1 %; for obese women it is 21.3 %. The difference is statistically and economically significant. An obese woman would need to send 37 % more resumes to obtain the same number of callbacks as a non-obese woman. We explore different channels that could explain this result, including customer discrimination (employer discrimination based on perception of customer expectations), productivity and salary, the gender of the person making the hiring decision, and the proportion of women in the occupation. We find no strong evidence in favor of any one channel. Advertisements with men identified as the contact person discriminate more than those with women, but replacing those men with women would reduce the observed gap in callback rate no more than 25 %.

Keywords: Discrimination; Obesity; Women; Audit study; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J10 J16 J70 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X19301315
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:37:y:2020:i:c:s1570677x19301315

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2020.100850

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().