Overweight Women More Likely To Have Low-Paying Jobs Than Overweight Men

Fat shaming can have economic consequences.

As a woman gets heavier, her chances of working in a low-paying, physically taxing job grow, according to a new study from Jennifer Shinall, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. But weight doesn’t have nearly as much bearing on the type of job a man lands.

Though obese men are more likely than men of average weight to work in lower-paying, physical jobs, the effect isn't nearly as strong as it is for women. As a result, obese women make $7 less than their average-weight counterparts, while obese men make just $2 less.

“It absolutely suggests that weight is much more of a consideration in the labor market for women than it is for men,” Shinall told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Shinall’s findings add to the growing body of evidence that physical attributes play a depressingly large role in the lives of working women, no matter how they look. Very skinny women tend to get paid more. Hiring committees penalize attractive women by not calling them for interviews.

Such factors typically add to the broader discrimination women already face at work. Research shows women earn less than men in the same roles and are also more likely to work in low-paying fields.

Many female-dominated, low-wage jobs, such as home health care and child care, are where obese and morbidly obese women are most likely to end up, Shinall’s study found.

"Those are the only jobs that are available for the heaviest women in the labor market," she said.

For her study, Shinall analyzed occupation, health and population data for 10,007 women and 8,928 men. She found that, the heavier women get, the more likely they'll end up working in jobs that require more physical activity.

The opposite is true for women seeking jobs in fields that involve a lot of personal interaction, such as sales. Women become less likely to land those roles the more overweight they are. Morbidly obese women who do get jobs in such fields are paid about 5 percent less, on average, than other women, even controlling for factors like education, the study found.

For men, on the other hand, being heavier can actually boost earnings in some jobs. Overweight men working in more physical jobs make about 4 percent more, on average, than their average-weight colleagues, according to the study.

Shinall said she suspects that one of the main reasons obese and morbidly obese women tend to cluster in low-paying, strenuous jobs is because of discrimination in hiring for white-collar roles. Companies may not want an overweight woman representing them to customers, she said, and it's also possible that the person doing the hiring may not want to work with an obese woman.

Overweight Women More Likely To Have Low-Paying Jobs Than Overweight Men

Fat shaming can have economic consequences.

As a woman gets heavier, her chances of working in a low-paying, physically taxing job grow, according to a new study from Jennifer Shinall, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. But weight doesn’t have nearly as much bearing on the type of job a man lands.

Though obese men are more likely than men of average weight to work in lower-paying, physical jobs, the effect isn't nearly as strong as it is for women. As a result, obese women make $7 less than their average-weight counterparts, while obese men make just $2 less.

“It absolutely suggests that weight is much more of a consideration in the labor market for women than it is for men,” Shinall told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Shinall’s findings add to the growing body of evidence that physical attributes play a depressingly large role in the lives of working women, no matter how they look. Very skinny women tend to get paid more. Hiring committees penalize attractive women by not calling them for interviews.

Such factors typically add to the broader discrimination women already face at work. Research shows women earn less than men in the same roles and are also more likely to work in low-paying fields.

Many female-dominated, low-wage jobs, such as home health care and child care, are where obese and morbidly obese women are most likely to end up, Shinall’s study found.

"Those are the only jobs that are available for the heaviest women in the labor market," she said.

For her study, Shinall analyzed occupation, health and population data for 10,007 women and 8,928 men. She found that, the heavier women get, the more likely they'll end up working in jobs that require more physical activity.

The opposite is true for women seeking jobs in fields that involve a lot of personal interaction, such as sales. Women become less likely to land those roles the more overweight they are. Morbidly obese women who do get jobs in such fields are paid about 5 percent less, on average, than other women, even controlling for factors like education, the study found.

For men, on the other hand, being heavier can actually boost earnings in some jobs. Overweight men working in more physical jobs make about 4 percent more, on average, than their average-weight colleagues, according to the study.

Shinall said she suspects that one of the main reasons obese and morbidly obese women tend to cluster in low-paying, strenuous jobs is because of discrimination in hiring for white-collar roles. Companies may not want an overweight woman representing them to customers, she said, and it's also possible that the person doing the hiring may not want to work with an obese woman.

Janet Yellen: Rising Income Inequality Could Seriously Harm The U.S. Economy

The Federal Reserve is sounding increasingly alarmed about income inequality.

"The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me," Fed Chair Janet Yellen said in a speech at an inequality conference in Boston on Friday. Her comments come just days after Swiss bank Credit Suisse warned that inequality in the U.S. is at levels that have been associated with recessions in the past, with one key measure at its highest level since the Great Depression.

Though Yellen didn't go so far as to echo Credit Suisse's recession alarm, she did warn that rising inequality risked doing serious harm to the overall strength of the U.S. economy. Yellen, too, noted that "income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then."

Yellen suggested such inequality is downright un-American:

"I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity," she said.

Patriotism aside, inequality is also a worry because of its ill effects on the economy. As Yellen noted, living standards have been "stagnant" for most Americans for the past few decades, an unhealthy development for an economy that relies mainly on consumer spending to drive growth.

One key measure of inequality at its highest level since the Great Depression (Source: Credit Suisse)

And inequality tends to foster even more inequality, Yellen suggested, as the well-off tend to have better access to economic opportunity than the poor. And if the have-nots have fewer opportunities to climb the economic ladder, that hurts the general health and vibrancy of the economy.

Yellen's been warning about inequality for a while, telling Congress in February and in May that it was a "disturbing" trend. Congress, shockingly, has done nothing to address it.

On Friday she suggested a handful of possible solutions, including early childhood education, making college cheaper and helping entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, the Fed, the nation's central bank, has exactly zero control over any of those things, noted the Washington Post's Ylan Mui.

The Fed might even have made inequality worse, with stimulus measures that have boosted stock and bond prices, mainly a boon to the already wealthy. Yellen noted that the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans own two-thirds of all stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other such financial assets.

Even lower mortgage rates, one of the most direct Fed stimulus effects, have mainly helped people who already own homes or have credit good enough to buy homes. Many of those people are closer to the middle and bottom of the economic ladder, at least. But the small bounce in home prices since the Great Recession has been dwarfed by soaring stock and bond prices, and has done nothing for those homeowners' stagnant wages.

These 5 Scary Obamacare Predictions Were Dead Wrong

Predicting the ways in which Obamacare would fail and ruin America has been something of a cottage industry for conservative politicians and talking heads since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.

Sometimes the Obamacare haters resolutely held their ground even as the facts disproved their theories. This is known as "Obamacare trutherism".

So let's take a journey down Bonkers Lane and remember together some of the scariest prognostications about Obamacare that turned out to be untrue.

1. Prediction: No One Is Going To Pay For Health Insurance

What happened: Just About Everyone Paid For Health Insurance. After we learned that more than 8 million Americans signed up for health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges by April, it became hard to argue that no one would enroll. So conservatives moved on to a new theory: No one was actually gonna pay for it. The taker-class, 47 percenters who had latched on to the government teat were deadbeats who don't pay their bills, the argument went, basically. "But how many have paid??" they asked. Over and over.

House Energy and Commerce Republicans released a laughable "report" in April asserting only two-thirds of enrollees had paid premiums. Then they held a hearing about it, where health insurance company executives lined up to tell them they were were dead wrong, and the number was more like 80 percent to 90 percent.

Finally, after months of caginess, the Obama administration offered a real answer: 7.3 million enrollees were paid up as of Aug. 15. That's down from the 8 million announced in April, but still more than the 6 million the Congressional Budget Office predicted would sign up.

"Thank you for the health insurance. Here is my money." - Most people

2. Prediction: Premiums Are Going To Skyrocket!!

What happened: Premiums Went Up A Smidge. Maybe the loudest, most persistent prediction was that health insurance prices would go through the roof next year because so many sick people would sign up, and so few young people, that insurers would have to jack up prices -- maybe even by as much as 300 percent! And then a "death spiral" would begin and undermine the whole industry!

Back to reality: Forty-six percent of the people who bought plans on the exchanges said the plans were less expensive than the ones they had in 2013, according to a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation survey from March and April.

Thirty-nine percent of enrollees surveys did said their new plans were more expensive. These higher rates mainly affected younger, healthier people who earn too much money to qualify for tax credits to help pay for coverage. Eight-five percent of everyone who enrolled got these subsidies. And the increases were likely a one-time bump, mainly caused by rules making the insurance package better, so it isn't relevant to 2015. And yet...

"O-Care premiums to skyrocket," screamed a March headline in The Hill, which remains the only entity that uses the term "O-Care." FOX News was ON IT. Health insurance prices are going to double -- triple even. Trainwreck!

The basis for this shocking report? Anonymous quotes from "health industry officials." Which ones? Who knows! Stop asking questions. From The Hill:

“...I think everybody knows that the way the exchange has rolled out...is going to lead to higher costs,” said one senior insurance executive who requested anonymity.

The insurance official, who hails from a populous swing state, said his company expects to triple its rates next year on the ObamaCare exchange.

Color us rate-shocked! But wait -- what's that, consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers? The average premium increase on the exchanges next year will be 6 percent? (That's less than 300 percent, if you don't have a calculator handy.) That doesn't seem so bad, and is lower than typical increases for individual insurance policies before Obamacare.

This Is What's Up With Obamacare Premiums In 2015

Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute

3. Prediction: Obamacare Is The Worst Thing To Happen To Young People Since Moms Joined Facebook

What Happened: A Lot Of Young People Are Insured, Pleasing Moms Everywhere. Young adults were urged to "burn their Obamacare cards" by right-wing outfits trying to disrupt Affordable Care Act implementation. Their argument: Obamacare is a bad deal for 20-somethings because they'd be paying a ton just so old people and sick people could go to the doctor. Millennials were better off paying the fine for violating the law's individual mandate than buying health insurance. And anyway, these "young invincibles" didn't even want health insurance (contrary to what they actually said in polls, but whatever).

Obamacare was designed to "screw" young adults, they were told. But in 2010, the law started allowing people to stay on their parents' health insurance policies until they turn 26, and in 2014 it began offering subsidized coverage to people with low and moderate incomes, which includes lots of young people just starting their careers. The result:

The Uninsured Rate

Among 19- to 25-Year-Olds

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via White House Council of Economic Advisers

4. Prediction: Obamacare Is INCREASING The Uninsured Rate!

What happened: Obamacare DECREASED The Uninsured Rate. Considering that the Affordable Care Act will spend about $1 trillion over a decade to subsidize health benefits and requires most people to get covered, this idea seems just plain silly. But that hasn't stopped politicians and others from expressing it aloud!

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) himself got in on the action, saying in March there was a "net loss of people with health insurance." Whoa if true.

All available evidence shows that the uninsured rate is down -- way down. According to Gallup, it hasn't been this low since the 1990s.

Source: Gallup

The Department of Health and Human Services and the Harvard School of Public Health concluded in a New England Journal of Medicine article that 10.3 million more people have health insurance this year than did last year.

5. Prediction: Obamacare Will Destroy The Private Health Insurance Industry

What happened: Health Insurance Companies Got A Lot Of New Business. A big part of this claim rests on exploiting public confusion about what "Obamacare" is, and ignoring the fact that private health insurance is what's being sold on the exchanges. (Not to mention that even "single-payer" Medicaid is largely contracted out to private insurance companies.)

Another component of this prediction was that the Affordable Care Act lays too many regulations on health insurers. And there are lots and lots of regulations, like the prohibition against rejecting customers with pre-existing conditions and the mandate for a guaranteed minimum benefits package, that insurers wish they didn't have to follow.

"Look at what we've done to eviscerate the U.S. health insurance industry," Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said on FOX News in April.

Yes, look. After the first enrollment period brought in more than 7 million paying customers and the promise of millions more in the future, health insurance companies grew more confident (even some of those, like Aetna, that expect to lose money on the exchanges in 2014).

How confident? There will be 248 more health insurance plans available on the exchanges for 2015 than there were this year, a net increase of 25 percent (including a few companies that bowed out) compared to the first enrollment period.

Not a photo of the U.S. health insurance industry

All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone

Here's more proof the middle class is dying.

The middle-class share of American wealth has been shrinking for the better part of three decades and recently fell to its lowest level since 1940, according to a new study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics.

In other words, remember the surge of the great American middle class after World War II? That's all gone, at least by one measure.

In this case, "middle class" is defined rather expansively as the bottom 90 percent of all Americans. "Wealth" is the total of home equity, stock and bond holdings, pension plans and other assets, minus debt. As such assets are mostly owned by mid- to higher-income households -- and considering most Americans define themselves as "middle-class" -- it seems reasonable to use the bottom 90 percent as a proxy for the "middle class."

Saez and Zucman discussed their paper in a blog post for the Washington Center For Equitable Growth on Monday that included this stark chart:

Debt has been the big force driving net wealth lower for the middle class, according to Saez and Zucman. Brief bubbles in stock and home prices in the 1990s and 2000s only temporarily offset the steady, depressing rise in mortgage, student-loan, credit-card and other debts for the bottom 90 percent.

"Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before," Saez and Zucman wrote.

Another important factor has been that incomes have stagnated for most Americans over the past few decades, once adjusted for inflation. Along with rising debt levels, stagnant wages have made it impossible for most families to save very much money.

And who has been the beneficiary of this middle-class misery? The top 0.1 percent of Americans, whose incomes have just kept rising, and whose share of wealth has soared to levels not seen since Jay Gatsby was still staring at the blinking green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock:

In fact, the middle class is not alone in suffering from shrinking wealth. The rest of the top 10 percent of Americans below the 0.1 percent -- the "merely rich," Saez and Zucman call them -- have also suffered from falling household wealth over the past four decades.

This rising inequality of wealth can only lead to more inequality of income and wealth in the future, Saez and Zucman warned, echoing French economist Thomas Piketty. The very rich will just keep getting richer by living on the returns from their wealth, while the rest of us will keep falling behind.

Gap Between Richest And The Rest Widened After The Recession: Fed

Sept 4 (Reuters) - The gap between the richest Americans and the rest of the nation widened after the Great Recession, a survey by the Federal Reserve showed on Thursday, suggesting deepening U.S. income inequality.

Though incomes of the highest-earners rose, none of the groups analyzed by the Fed had regained their 2007 income levels by 2013, underscoring deep scars from the financial crisis and its aftermath.

The data comes from a massive survey of consumer finances conducted by the Fed Board of Governors every three years. Many other studies have also shown the lasting effects of the recession and documented rising income disparity in the United States.

The Fed survey released suggests that wealth and income is concentrated not just within the top 1 percent, as some analyzes have suggested, but actually among a slighly broader slice of the ultra-rich: the top 3 percent.

From 2010 to 2013, average income for U.S. families rose about 4 percent after accounting for inflation, the survey showed. All of the income growth was concentrated among the top earners, the survey showed, with the top 3 percent accounting for 30.5 percent of all income.

The disparity was even greater by wealth, with the top 3-percent holding 54.4 percent of all net worth in 2013, up from 51.8 percent in 2007 and 44.8 percent in 1989.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen has called income inequality a disturbing trend, attributing some of it to the weak jobs market but also to underlying trends like technology and globalization.

Overall for U.S. families, wealth stabilized from 2010 to 2013, after falling sharply during the prior three years. Fed economists attributed that pattern to the declines in home and business ownership during the recession, which stripped many families of their biggest sources of wealth.

Families with income in the bottom half of those surveyed reduced their participation in retirement plans, continuing a trend seen from 2007 to 2010, but middle-income families increased their participation somewhat, the survey found. Still, overall participation rates were down from levels seen in 2007.

Although wealth did not change much overall, many measures of debt decreased, the survey found, driven largely by declines in home ownership. On average, debt fell 13 percent.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Tom Brown)

McDonald's Says Russian Officials Shut Down 12 Locations

MOSCOW, Aug 29 (Reuters) - McDonald's said on Friday that a total of 12 of its branches in Russia had been temporarily closed over the state food safety regulator's allegations of sanitary violations.

The U.S. fast-food chain, which has 440 restaurants in the country, also said that more than 100 inspections were underway at its restaurants in various regions of Russia.

"We are studying the essence of claims in order to determine the necessary actions for the swift re-opening of restaurants for visitors," it said in a statement. (Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Pravin Char)

From Wednesday:

MOSCOW, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Russian courts on Wednesday backed the temporary closure of three McDonald's restaurants in Moscow for breaches of sanitary rules, amid a standoff with the West over Ukraine, while the state food safety watchdog suspended work at a fourth.

The three restaurants - on Moscow's Manezh square, under the walls of the Kremlin, at Pushkin Square and on Prospect Mira - have been closed since last week on the orders of the watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor. The court rulings confirmed that decision.

Rospotrebnadzor has introduced sweeping checks, including unscheduled inspections, at McDonald's restaurants across the country.

On Wednesday it ordered the temporary closure of a fourth branch in the capital - the sixth nationwide.

Russian businessmen have said the crackdown is linked to the crisis over Ukraine, which has soured U.S.-Russian relations and led to a round of sanctions and trade restrictions. Rospotrebnadzor has denied that its actions are politically motivated.

McDonald's said it would appeal the court rulings, which ordered the three Moscow branches to be closed for 90 days.

"We do not agree with the courts' decisions and will appeal them according to established procedures. We will continue to take care of our employees and do everything we can to continue successful operations in Russia," said a spokeswoman for the U.S. firm in Russia.

A lawyer representing McDonald's in the court, Maksim Titarenko, was also quoted as saying the courts' decisions to close the branches were unjustified.

"The court has ordered the maximum penalty under this article of the administrative offenses code although there are no grounds for it," Interfax news agency quoted Titarenko as saying.

A court in the Urals region delivered a similar ruling on Wednesday when it ordered the closure of a McDonald's restaurant in the city of Yekaterinburg for 85 days, backing the food safety watchdog's decision the day before.

McDonald's operates 440 restaurants in Russia and considers the country one of its top seven markets outside the United States and Canada, according to its 2013 annual report. Almost 1 million people a day visit its restaurants in Russia. (Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Additional reporting by Natalia Shurmina in Yekaterinburg; Editing by Louise Heavens and Pravin Char)