The skinny and rich conundrum

Eating disorders among executive women on the rise

Photo credit: “I Don’t Know How She Does It” movie

In the latest Sarah Jessica Parker movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It, SJP plays the role of Kate Reddy, a Boston-based corporate executive in the financial industry. As a mother of two children, Kate struggles with finding the balance in her responsibilities as a wife, mother and high-income breadwinner. (Of course, she manages to do it with a gorgeous wardrobe and designer stilettos.) The movie explores the usual accidental hilarity of work versus family challenges. But one thing the film doesn’t address is that the overworked, exhausted and highly successful Kate (i.e., SJP) is remarkably fit and thin. Okay sure, it’s just a movie. But seriously, she must secretly work out, right? Does she eat?

Skipping lunch

For a woman in a job such as Kate Reddy’s, there is growing evidence to suggest that perhaps she doesn’t, in fact, eat. Gordon Gecko (in the movie Wall Street) famously said “lunch is for wimps,” but today’s female executives are skipping lunch for an altogether more alarming reason. A recent story in Forbes media highlighted the issue of eating disorders among businesswomen.

The Renfrew Center, one of the largest eating disorder clinics in the United States, claims that over the past five years, they have had a 42 percent increase in patients over the age of 35. Career anxiety and juggling the conflicting demands of home and office responsibilities are the most often cited triggers among mid-life eating disorders.

The Type A phenomenon

It takes a certain personality to climb the ranks of the corporate world, particularly in highly competitive industries such as corporate finance or advertising. Women who succeed are often highly self-disciplined and perfectionist by nature, which extends not just to their work, but to their physical appearance as well. When healthy food choices or exercise regimes shift into obsessive–compulsive behaviour, an eating disorder is often the result.

The dangerous facts

Unfortunately, a study of roughly 25,000 women in the United States and Germany revealed that skinny women make more money. According to researchers from the London Business School and the University of Florida, “very thin” women earn nearly $22,000 more than women viewed as “average weight”. The findings were reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2010.

Perhaps the worst news revealed by the study is that women who gain weight find themselves financially penalized. When American women who weighed 25 pounds below average weight gained 25 pounds (thereby achieving an average weight), their salary dropped by more than $15,500. Women of average weight who put on additional pounds were not punished quite as much, in theory because their salaries were already lower than if they had been thinner to begin with.

Sixty is the new thirty

The cliché is that men who have mid-life crises buy sports cars and have affairs. Have you noticed there is no cliché for women who have mid-life crises? Perhaps that’s because it’s less socially acceptable for a woman to embrace mid-life in the first place. As one woman in the Forbes’ article said, “Someone would tell me, ‘60 is the new 30’. And what I would hear was, ‘When you’re 60, you’d better look 30.’”

While doctors will tell you it is normal for a woman over 30 to gain a pound a year, for women who are used to being in control of their weight, this can cause panic. Then there are the struggles to lose baby weight and major life-changing triggers such as marriage, divorce, home relocation and career decisions. For women trying to “do it all,” it’s no wonder many turn to severe dieting or unhealthy binge and purge sessions to try to gain control of the one highly visible area they feel they can have power over: their body.

So how do we do it?

There is no point in pretending that unreasonable stereotypes and skinny-girl media saturation don’t exist. They are all around us and are perpetuated by every generation who grows up with a Barbie doll or who aspires to be a Disney princess.

The most important thing we can do, as adult women, is support each other and watch for clues of eating disorders among our girlfriends and colleagues. As managers, we can be cognizant of the societal bias toward thinness and aim to reward and promote our junior staff on the basis of merit, not weight nor beauty. Finally, if we can make it okay to be honest about stress and normalize the ability to not “have it all” at all times, we can go a long way toward taking some of that pressure off ourselves.

 

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