Women more often hired after losing weight on GLP-1s: Study

(NewsNation) — A recent study shows women who are on GLP-1s weren’t just losing weight but also increasing their chances of getting hired at a new job.

Rebecca Diamond, an economics professor at Harvard University, told Business Insider she conducted the study after talking to a friend who made a comment about being treated better after losing weight from using GLP-1 drugs.

The research paper showed that the employment rate for women who weren’t working before taking the weight loss drugs rose 27 percent after about a year and a half of taking GLP-1s.

“Mass pharmacological weight loss is not only a health shock. It is also a shock to the social and labor-market valuation of body weight,” Diamond wrote. “What does not change for women is equally informative.”

“The arrangements that do not respond are the ones already in place, where any first impression occurred long ago and where weight is one characteristic embedded in a much richer stock of information,” she added.

For her research, Diamond analyzed the University of California’s (USC) Understanding America Study, an online panel of more than 10,000 U.S. adults, to determine the employment and relationship status of women who started using GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, compared with women who were interested in taking the medication but hadn’t yet started.

She then got a control group from the USC panel of women who expressed interest in obesity drugs but hadn’t taken them yet. Not only were unemployed women who started on a GLP-1 more likely to land a job, but single women taking the weight loss medicine were also more likely, by equal measure, to get married or start living with a partner over the time period surveyed.

The only thing that did not change, however, was their self-reported life satisfaction.

“Despite life looking better on paper, it doesn’t seem like there’s some subjective wellbeing improvement that is going along with it,” Diamond said.

The only thing she could not determine from her study was whether women who started taking the drugs eventually earned more, as there wasn’t enough data in the panel over the time that was studied.