A Matter Of Weight -- Sizing Up Discrimination As Some Workers Find Laws, Attitudes Are Slow To Change

The director of public relations at a major East Coast medical center didn't expect the kind of reception she got from her new boss when she arrived for her first day of work.

"My God, you've put on a lot of weight since we interviewed you," her boss blurted out. "I'm not sure this is the image we want for the hospital."

From that day on, the woman (who asked that her name not be used) remained under close scrutiny - she weighed more than 230 pounds - and was constantly pressured to diet. At 40, she had successfully held several managerial positions, and she found the treatment demeaning. She felt set apart from others and was subjected to humiliating comments.

Although she had an expensive professional wardrobe, her boss told her that she should wear only black or navy clothes to work; she knew that meant ones that would hide her size.

"Every time I walked into the office, I got a quick once-over to see what I was wearing and whether I'd lost weight," she remembers.

To keep her job, she had to promise to go on a diet and get counseling.

"It cost me a great deal of money," she recalls. "They checked up on me - but didn't pay for the treatment."

At a staff meeting, her boss asked her to announce to everyone that she was starting a liquid diet.

"I felt tremendous disapproval," she says. "I dreaded going to work."

In previous jobs, her weight had never interfered with her effectiveness.

"My ability to do my job isn't impaired because I'm heavy," she says. "People know through my performance and abilities that I'm a person whose work they value."

At the hospital, too, she was successful, raising large sums of money, garnering national publicity and developing award-winning programs for more than a year. Despite this success, one Friday afternoon she was called into her boss's office and fired. The woman didn't mention her weight directly. She only said, "Things that should have changed didn't change."

The PR director decided not to file a lawsuit; besides her fears that it would hurt her prospects for finding another job, the experience had taken a toll on her confidence and made it hard to fight back.

"Weight is the last bastion of acceptable discrimination," says Sally Smith, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), a 4,500-member group devoted to improving the self-esteem and ensuring the civil rights of obese people. Even if the PR director had sued, she probably wouldn't have won: Michigan is the only state in the country with a law that protects the employment rights of fat people.

That may be changing.

Washington state and King County Democrats are taking up the issue as a campaign plank, supporting legislation that would "prohibit discrimination based upon physical characteristics in the areas of employment, public accommodation and transportation."

In November, a federal appeals court for the first and, thus far, only time, ruled that someone who is "morbidly obese," or twice the normal weight for one's height - a category that an estimated 1 million to 2 million Americans fall into - may be protected from job discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In the case, Bonnie Cook, a 320-pound Rhode Island woman, was refused a job as an attendant at a center for developmentally disabled people because of her weight, even though she had held the job before at the same weight.

But discrimination attorneys say there are no precedents for protecting the rights of the vast majority of overweight Americans because they aren't fat enough to be considered disabled. By government standards, at least a quarter to a third of the population are over their ideal weight.

"People who are moderately overweight fall through the cracks," says Mary Dryovage, a San Francisco attorney who handles sex-discrimination and disability-rights cases. "It would be very tough to prove discrimination." For instance, few restaurant owners, she says, would come out and tell a 150-pound applicant that she was too fat for the job. "But if she looked around, she'd realize all the other waitresses weighed 110 pounds, and she'd never be hired."

Job hunting

Barbara Lynch, co-chairwoman of the Washington state NAAFA chapter, describes herself as a "person of size." She knows that most prospective employers see her not as a qualified applicant but as a fat woman.

"There's a difference between what they see on paper, what they hear on the phone, and how they feel about me as a person once they have me in their office, taking up space," says Lynch, 37.

Twelve years ago, Lynch started Puffin Computer Systems Inc. at her home in Kirkland after being unable to get a job suitable to her master's degree in business.

Janine Mueller, 31, who says she weighs 400 pounds, has made a living selling large-size women's clothing, even owning her own business in Los Angeles, before coming to the Puget Sound area five years ago to attend Pacific Lutheran University.

"When I first began in business, I was very sought after," she says. "I knew the business. I could wear the clothing."

Now armed with a bachelor's degree in communications, Mueller has been unable to get work in that field. In fact, she says, job-search agencies have been unwilling to take her on as a client.

"They don't come out and say, `You're just too fat for the job,' " says Mueller. "But I feel some of it is size-related. You can read body language."

Once a large person overcomes initial obstacles to get a job, the challenges he or she faces aren't over. The desk chair may be too small. The restroom stalls may not be big enough to turn around in or sit down in. The person may have to buy two seats on an airplane if flying for business.

On the employee side of many airlines, size remains a hiring consideration with strict weight and height requirements for flight attendants, says Jill Gallagher, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants in Washington, D.C.

Although Alaska Airlines has no specific limits on height and weight, the Seattle-based carrier's interviewers look for applicants who are proportionate, among other qualifications.

"We view the customer-contact individual as the personification of the company as a whole, and we want them to convey a professional image," says Greg Witter, Alaska's director of corporate communications. A person whose weight is out of proportion with his or her height isn't considered to have that image.

Already, Massachusetts and New York are considering legislation that would add height and weight to statutes covering employment and housing (a similar bill recently failed in Texas). Eventually, advocates hope to expand the federal Civil Rights Act to cover fat people.

Ways to argue cases

In the meantime, it's likely that attorneys will try new ways to argue cases concerning fat discrimination. Many cases will be argued as sex-discrimination cases. Several studies, including a recent one conducted at Harvard University, show that fat women are much more likely than fat men to experience job discrimination because of their weight.

The consequences of being a fat working woman are becoming increasingly obvious. The Harvard study, which included women of all weights, found that overweight women - they averaged 5 feet 3 inches and 200 pounds - had household incomes that averaged $6,710 below those of thinner women and were 10 percent more likely to live in poverty.

In a society that looks on being overweight as a personal flaw akin to being lazy, sloppy or greedy, fat people have a long way to go to change attitudes and laws. Even people who profess no prejudice against fat people say that passing special legislation to protect them is going too far.

"We're regulating ourselves to death," says Matt Halpern, a management lawyer with New York-based Jackson Lewis. He argues that the courts could be clogged with people who claim they were discriminated against because they gained a few pounds. Halpern also believes that employers should have some leeway in choosing the people they hire.

"Employers want a professional look or image, and they have a right to that choice," Halpern says, pointing out that many are reluctant to hire sloppy dressers or people with unkempt hair. "You could come up with hundreds of characteristics that make people less likely to get the job than someone who doesn't have them. That doesn't mean they have to be afforded legal protection."

Activists point out that these are the very arguments once used to sanction discrimination on the basis of race, gender and sexual preference.

"It's the same as saying you don't want to hire blacks because the customers won't like it, or that you don't want to hire women because they can't handle sales," says Art Stine, executive assistant to the director of Michigan's Department of Civil Rights, which handles the dozen or so weight-discrimination cases that the state investigates each year.

Stine thinks the small number of cases reflects people's consciousness of the issue or the law, not the level of discrimination. Most complaints are found to be valid and are usually settled during the investigation; the employee is reinstated or given back pay. And most of the companies involved in the complaints end up developing policies against fat discrimination.

"People say government keeps adding more protected classes and we don't need another category of victims," says Daniel Feldman, the Brooklyn legislator who introduced the New York bill that would add body size to the state's civil-rights laws. "But government intervention is justified when there's a widespread pattern of discrimination. If blondes were discriminated against in the same way fat people are, we'd have to add blondes to the list."

Information from Seattle Times business reporter Francine Thistle Tyler is included in this report.