A new study from the University of Exeter reveals that not living up to conventional physical standards could make your life harder in more than just the dating department.
Researchers wanted to determine whether being a shorter man or a heavier woman makes it harder to become successful in one's career.
But it can be hard to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between those factors, because if someone is born into a lower-income family, they’re already at risk of poor nutrition, which could slow their growth or cause them to be obese.
So to remove socio-economic factors, scientists analyzed the genes of 120,000 British people to determine how their genetics could have allowed them to turn out, regardless of how they were raised. The results were unfortunately unsurprising.
"If you could take the same man, say a 5’10” man and make him 5’7," and send him through life, he would be about £1,500 worse off per year," professor Tim Frayling said.
The same rang true for women who were about 14 pounds heavier than average. They too would lose £1,500, or more than $2,100, in average annual income.
While the study doesn’t pinpoint exactly why there’s such a disparity, researchers said they hope their work prompts more scientists to look into workplace discrimination.
This video includes a clip from The BMJ and images from Getty Images and University of Exeter / CC BY 2.0.
