Prof: Fat ladies don't get to be CEOs, lardy blokes do New research carried out on Fortune 1000 CEOs indicates that fatcat biz kingpins are, in fact, fatter than the rest of us - but not if they're women. Counterintuitively perhaps, it appears that breaking through the glass ceiling is more difficult for the heftier lady. "The results suggest that while being obese limits the …
Did the researchers check historical photos to ensure that the CEOs had been fat/thin before climbing that greasy pole? I would be very interested to know if the job of CEO turns a boss-lite into a lard-boss (and equally if the stresses of running HP would cause a boss to lose weight).
If one looks at newsreaders - what we call anchorpersons on this side of the Atlantic - one will find the same thing. Men are not judged by their looks nearly as much as women are. An older man, or one with a bit of extra weight, might simply be thought of as mature and wise, but when women put on weight, or show their age, the impression others - to some extent, even women as well as men - have is exclusively negative.
A study that confirms the obvious might be a waste of time, but I wouldn't suspect it of finding the wrong answer.
Simply put, age.
The majority of men thicken as they age. A former boss of mine, as lean and active a person as you will ever meet, ran into me years after he'd moved on. I was shocked at how he'd gone very thick through the middle.
Ergo, since it takes longer to become CEO than a middle management drone, CEOs can be expected to be heftier than mm.
QED etc.
"Given that all this is based on wild guesses at body mass index (BMI), and that BMI is itself a deeply suspicious way of measuring fatness"
Not so. The experiment was clearly based on actual (apparent) body mass, not on BMI at all. The latter may have been quoted in the study but you have your comment totally reversed.
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