The size matters!

The topic for today is “weight discrimination”.

Task 1

Read the text below to get the general idea:

According to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland (Art. 33), men and women should have equal rights regarding employment and work compensation. By the book, all people ought to be treated exactly in the same way regardless of their race, origin, sex, age, religion, size or looks. In practice, however, the laws are frequently broken on discrimination grounds commonly referred to as sizeism or lookism. These are the latest forms of prejudice which nowadays can be observed in many companies around the world. It is said that they have recently even outpaced things like racism, sexism or ageism.

In general, sizeism or weight discrimination is based on the idea that what really matters in the workplace is your size or body shape (subjectively described as bigger than the average?!) not your knowledge, experience or skills. It means that overweight people are unfairly treated only because they look larger, they are fatter, or what is worse, they tend not to fit the so called physical requirements of the company profile. As a result, oversized workers are usually underpaid and have fewer career prospects than their slimmer colleagues, because they are merely judged on their looks instead of their performance.

The latest research conducted by a law firm in America has revealed cases of appearance discrimination in more than 16% of companies. Moreover, 33% of American citizens believe that the physically attractive are more likely to get promoted or receive payrises in comparison with their obese co-workers. Therefore, some kind of legal remedy or beauty bias legislation is definitely needed to help the victims of lookism to fight for their rights in courts.