Study: English-speakers more likely to discriminate against obese job seekers

Is it more difficult for someone who’s overweight to get a job?

New research shows English speakers are much more reluctant to even give a job interview to someone who is obese, compared to Spanish speakers.

ABC-7 got those numbers from the Paso del Norte Institute for Healthy Living on Wednesday. The hope is to show how a perceived “weight bias”adds to the problem of overcoming obesity.

The numbers appear to show a cultural divide in the Borderland when it comes to this issue.

“I think everybody should be treated fairly,” El Pasoan Rod Ramirez said. “It doesn’t matter what they weigh or how they look.”

“There’s no excuse for them to not be able to get a job just because they are a little obese,” added West El Pasoan Darlene Martinez.

El Pasoans weighed-in on the results of the study, which found that among 5,000 respondents, 41 percent of English speakers expressed reluctance to give obese people a job interview, while just 17 percent of Spanish speakers felt the same.

“It’s a disturbing number, it is,” El Paso employment lawyer Mike Milligan said. “That looks like statistical evidence of bias to me.”

“The U.S. population often blames the disease on the person who is experiencing it,” said Alisha Redelfs, deputy director for research and evaluation at the Paso del Norte Institute for Healthy Living. “In some other cultures that’s not necessarily the way that they look at it.”

“I think some of the stereotypes that come with obesity are that they’re lazy,” said Victoria Bruce, weight loss surgery ambassador for the Hospitals at Providence. “I talk with a lot of Hispanic patients when they come in and their family doesn’t want them to do it. They don’t believe in weight loss surgery.”

“Spanish speakers are less likely to discriminate against people who struggle with weight,” said Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician from Boston, who came in to speak at the event.

“It’s probably one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination, weight based discrimination,” Stanford said, “And just as we deal with issues as it relates to race and ethnicity, we really need to deal with issues as it relates to weight and how that we we are able to across the board freely discriminate and not really face any repercussions of that.”