Kim (basement variety) emailed me this USA Today article.

The paychecks of obese workers are, on average, about 2.5% less than the paychecks of their thinner counterparts in the same professions, a new study says.

And the wage penalty is much greater for overweight women … as much as 6.2% … according to the study submitted to the journal Health Economics.

Obese workers who are paid $1.25 less an hour over a 40-year career wind up with $100,000 less before taxes, says co-author William Ford, an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University and a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

“It’s very clear that significantly overweight people are paying a huge price,” he says.

Obese workers overall suffered a wage penalty in the range of 1.4% to 4.5%. The penalty for obese women ranged from 2.3% to 6.2% vs. a range of 0.7% to 2.6% for men.

Obese men face discrimination, but it typically doesn’t kick in until they are very obese, says Miriam Berg, president of the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination. Women encounter weight discrimination for being just 30 pounds overweight, she says.

This AP story shot around a bit early this week:

White women with BA’s lag in pay, census finds

Washington - Black and Asian women with bachelor’s degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with four-year degrees make more than anyone else.

A white woman with a bachelor’s degree typically earned nearly $37,800 in 2003, compared with nearly $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a college-educated black woman, according to figures being released today by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home slightly less at $37,600 a year[….]

A white male with a college diploma earns far more than any similarly educated man or woman - in excess of $66,000 a year, according to the Census Bureau. Among men with bachelor’s degrees, Asians earned more than $52,000 a year, Hispanics earned $49,000 and blacks earned more than $45,000.

This story was actually better than some, because it didn’t bury the fact that regardless of race, women as a group earn far less than men.

So why are black women and Asian women with degrees earning more annually than white women? As far as I can tell, it’s because white women, on average, are more likely to be part-time workers. As Tiffany at Blackfeminism.org pointed out, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research took a closer look at the data. They found that when the comparison was limited to only those women who work full-time, year-round, the “white disadvantage” disappeared:

According to recently released 2004 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, African American women working full-time, full-year earn $26,992 in median annual earnings, compared with $32,036 earned by comparable white women workers.

Among those with a bachelor’s degree alone, African American women earn $38,160 compared with $40,700 earned by comparable white women. African American women are also less likely than white women to hold bachelor’s degrees or higher, with only 16.7 percent of African American women holding bachelor’s degrees in 2004, compared with 24.6 percent of white women.

Asian American women, in contrast, earned more than white women even when comparing year-round, full-time workers. This may possibly reflect higher average educational attainment among Asian American women than white women. However, Asian American women - like Latinas, Black women, and American Indian women - are more likely to live in poverty than white women. And in turn, white women are more likely to live in poverty than white men.

I’ve already seen some anti-feminists argue that the same thing is true of the wage gap between men and women - that is, the reason women appear to earn less is that men work more hours than women. It’s true that men work more hours; however, the wage gap is much larger than can be accounted for just by the difference in work hours. More here.

I thought of doing an April Fool’s post, but I was feeling uninspired. Fortunately, a lot of other bloggers aren’t as boring as me. Utopian Hell has been kind enough to catalog a bunch. My favorite was Rox’s astounding parody of Michelle Maklin, pulled off with the assistance of a cast of thousands (well, a bit over a dozen, anyhow).

And it’s not an April Fool’s joke, but this photo over at Lab Kat’s totally cracked me up. Man, those Aussie’s are strict.

Hey, if you know of any April Fool’s links (or, you know, whatever) that cracked you up, post ‘em in the comments. I could use more laughs.

There are many intelligent critiques to be made of Women’s Studies, and perhaps of Ethnic Studies as well. Unfortunately, there are many shallow and thoughtless critiques as well, and maybe these get made more often. Which brings me to this post on Finnegan’s Wake.

Finnegan, who is (I think) a philosophy major, has a good point; if bullying of queer kids in school has become much less common, then that’s a very significant and positive development. Unfortunately, he concluded his post with an attack on a certain group of majors:

Last, the comment that’s going to get me into trouble. LGBTQ studies, gender studies, ______ ethnic group studies, African Amerian studies, Judaic studies, etc: I just don’t understand concentrating one’s academic life on questions of group identification. There is more to an individual than his/her skin color or sexuality, and there’s a lot more to the world than one’s own existence and insecurities. I don’t doubt that there are interesting classes to take on all these subjects, and interesting papers to be written, but as majors they suggest a fantastic intellectual paucity. If you want to spend four years doing nothing but self-reflection, well, there are analysts for that. Meanwhile, the universe contains a great many phenomena and syntheses that you don’t know about, and you will never have a chance after your undergraduate years (graduate studies being obsessively single-minded even within a given field) to do something about that ignorance.

I responded in Finnegan’s comments, but I thought I might as well cross-post my (slightly edited) response here, as well. Sometimes I wish I were Amanda; this sort of thing is better responded to with withering sarcasm, but I’m not good at that. (Of course, Amanda does brilliant analysis as well.) (Gee, why does Amanda say I suck up to her flatter her shamelessly? I can’t imagine. She must be delusional. Poor deluded chick.)

In his comments, Finnegan wrote:

One phenomenon that seems apparent to me is that students in programs like Women’s and Gender Studies or AfAm Studies, etc., have a tendency to hermetically seal themselves off from other disciplines and from challenges to their orthodoxies.

I was a WS major (well, sort of a design-your-own major, based on economics and WS). Far from being “hermetically sealed,” WS had a huge number of courses cross-listed with different disciplines - much more so than any of the more standard majors.

There is more to an individual than his/her skin color or sexuality, and there’s a lot more to the world than one’s own existence and insecurities.

Your sneering description of what you imagine WS is like is so unrelated to the reality I experienced that it’s not even insulting; it’s just bewildering. It’s as if someone said “I could never be a philosophy major, they don’t learn anything; they just sit around contemplating how many angels could dance in their navel.” The statement speaks to the speaker’s bias and ignorance, but doesn’t actually say anything about the subject matter.

If you want to spend four years doing nothing but self-reflection, well, there are analysts for that.

Witty (well, not especially) put-downs are not a replacement for actual analysis or knowledge.

Meanwhile, the universe contains a great many phenomena and syntheses that you don’t know about…

All majors share this “flaw”; there is no major that will cover more than a tiny portion of the universe’s phenomena. I’ve known physicists and economists who have gone through college without ever reading a novel after freshman year, for example. I was initially interested in being a computer science major, but recoiled after realizing the required courses list would leave little chance to take other sorts of classes. Business majors typically have next-to-no interaction with the rest of the campus.

In fact, ethnic and women’s studies tend to be less cloistered than most other majors; at many universities, these courses are taught by professors from a variety of disciplines, hence all the cross-listing.

“…you will never have a chance after your undergraduate years (graduate studies being obsessively single-minded even within a given field) to do something about that ignorance.”

Colleges provide a structured environment for study; but it’s far from true, as this statement seems to suggest, that intellectual life ends when college ends.

You seem to think college should be a sort of intellectual broadness marathon, in which people choose majors based on trying to learn as many different phenomina as possible.

I think you’re mistaken. People should study what they’re passionately driven to study. There is intellectual richness to be found in almost any field, if you have a open mind; the silly “my major is better than yours” attitude of your post doesn’t reflect that reality.

Of course, to study just one field exclusively - whether women’s studies or philosophy or, I don’t know, French - would be kind of sad. But I think few if any students actually do this; most take classes outside their majors. Most of the WS majors I knew took minors (or a second major) in other disciplines; the same thing may even be true of philosophy majors, for all I know.