Male Jurors More Likely to Find Overweight Women Guilty
Researchers at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and
Obesity released a study that found male jury members were more likely to be
biased against an obese female defendant!!!!!
The study involved a
pool of 471 pretend jurors of varying body types and several defendants being
charged in hypothetical check fraud cases. The cases were all identical except
when it came to the defendant’s gender and weight; for their defendant, jurors
were presented with one of four images:
an obese man, a thin man, an obese woman, or a thin woman.
After being read a
vignette describing the case, jury members were asked to rate the defendant’s
guilt on a five-point scale. Male participants were more likely to have a
weight and gender bias such that when the defendant was female, male jurors
were “significantly more likely” to find her guilty if she was obese than if
she was thin.
There were no
differences in perceptions of guilt when the jurors were female or when the
male jurors were assessing the guilt of the male defendants; it was only when
male jurors were asked to rule on female defendants’ cases that the bias arose.
In addition, the
study’s thinner male participants frequently asserted that the obese female
defendant was “aware” of her crime and would be a “repeat offender” —
But why this gender weight bias?
Perhaps lean men associate heavier women (but not heavier men)
with impaired impulse control, since obviously all female people (but not all
male people) want desperately to be thin and are only not so when they can’t
regulate their cravings. Perhaps lean men imagine that a nebulous fog of guilt
surrounds all fat women, because fat — whether or not it is in fact unhealthy —
is morally wrong.?????!!!!!!!!!!!!
Someone commented that the issue at hand is socioeconomic — that
male jurors are more likely to correlate obese women with lower socioeconomic
class and obese men as socioeconomically “neutral”, but I don’t know how that
is supposed to be any better. Why are we willing to interpret obesity in a man
as either the sign of a bon vivant or a sign of nothing at all, while an obese
woman is a symbol of “letting oneself go”? It seems that society is heavily
invested in disciplining or punishing fat women, whether it be by shouting “fat
bitch” across the street, bullying them in gossip press headlines, undermining
their sexuality, or, even dismissing them as criminals.
SO SAD!!!!!
