Obese Or Disability Summary

The article titled Distaste or Disability? Evaluating the Legal Framework for Protecting Obese Workers by Jennifer Bennett Shinall takes a look at obese people in the work place and whether they are discriminated in the workplace due to distaste or actual physical disability. The article also examines the situation from a gender discrimination point of view, and whether or not gender plays a factor in employers discriminating against obese workers.

Back in 2008, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was amended by Congress. The amendment expanded the scope of medical conditions that it covered which has resulted in lawyers using this amendment to argue that obesity is now considered a disability and that firing an employee or not employing

Title VII is a federal law that prohibits employers from using sex, race, color, national origin, and religion to discriminate against employees. Using the sex discrimination aspect of Title VII might be the best option for obese women. There has already been many cases in where obese women have used Title VII in this exact way, a lot of which are against Airlines. Back in 1970 there was a case, Gerdom v Continental Airlines, Inc., in which a weight requirement was imposed on only female flight attendants, not male. The company tried to argue that it was part of their grooming requirements. “The Ninth Circuit held that even grooming requirements would violate Title VII if they failed an equal burdens analysis--that is, if grooming requirements were not "even-handedly applied to employees of both

Continental, as a result, had violated Title VII.” Title VII was able to help obese women in flight attendant positions in large part because these airline companies had explicit rules and guidelines in place regarding their weight. This made it easier for the plaintiffs to challenge these rules because they were written down and obvious that they were being enforced. However, in most jobs, this is not the case. There are no written rules that state employees must be a certain amount of weight. In a lot of these instances the employers are still not hiring obese women workers, and not because of safety reasons, like it could be argued in the airlines cases. They are not being hired because of employer taste. They don’t want these obese women employees working for them especially if they are out in the field interacting with customers and representing their company on a daily basis. So choosing to not hire, give raises, or promote obese women that are qualified and deserving is something that employers have a lot easier time getting away with. There is no documentation stating their reasoning and they’re not going to openly admit their decisions to not hire an obese woman because of her weight, so it is almost impossible to prove. Another issue for using Title VII is it really