How do you get the dream job?
....While young women may not be familiar with the academic literature and studies that discuss the links between job success and body size, they have heard anecdotes of what can happen to fat women in the corporate world. Consider Foxy’s summary of the situation:

If you have a woman who is insanely smart but she is bigger or not as attractive and then you have a woman who looks like a Barbie doll and isn’t as smart and they’re going for a position where they’re going to be in touch with people, they’ll be judged on their looks. The Barbie woman will probably get the job even though the other woman is better qualified for it.

I asked Foxy if her assumption was based on personal experience. She indicated that while she had never personally been discriminated against, she had heard about it in her business classes. Most of the women I’ve interviewed expressed a similar awareness and had plans to diet before entering the job market, much like Sarah whose story opened Chapter Two. A recent graduate, she was still trying to lose her “freshman fifteen” in anticipation of beginning her first job.

Getting the job isn’t the end of the worry, though. Rewards and punishment on the job can also be appearance-based. After graduation, Isabelle planned to begin a full time position as a chemical engineer for a Fortune 500 company. In a field dominated by men, she regularly faces harassment and discrimination that is appearance based, which in turn impacts how she feels about her body. She describes a situation she experienced while participating in a summer internship at this company:

It’s not like my ideas are ever discounted or people ever say, “she’s just a woman,” because that’s not PC. What they do is belittle and degrade you in different ways, in ways like lewd comments. I mean I was asked about my virginity at the lunch table. I was sitting at lunch with eight different guys and they were like, “Oh Isabelle, like you would still date a guy if you weren’t having sex with him after two months” or something like that. This conversation about my virginity is just completely inappropriate. I feel like that’s now how the power play goes on between men and women. I just feel like it plays a very large part of my life, in my image of my body.

Isabelle explained that this conversation made her feel like she was reduced to nothing more than a sexual body. Because her body is close to the ideal, her male colleagues approached her as if she were nothing more than a body. They completely ignored the fact that she had earned the right to be there professionally, as they had.

from Chapter Eight: Am I really fat?