San Jose Mercury News - June 1989

IT APPEARS that there's only one prejudice left in this country that you can state out loud without worrying about the consequences. No one in his right mind would, for example, speak racial slurs into a microphone and expect to go unchallenged. Neither would people with brains disparage women while at the office, or make light of the disabled in print.

We've all had our consciousnesses raised far too high for that, spent too many years hearing about the hurt that careless words can cause to individuals and to our society.

Yet there seems to be one group of people left that you can admit to being irrationally prejudiced about and not have people dismiss you as irrational. And that group, ladies and gentlemen, Is fat people.

The following words are those of Donald Lennox, former chairman and CEO of Navistar International Transportation Corp. (the former International Harvester Corp.) "I don't like fat people. If I were recruiting and some guy waddled in with a big gut, he'd be dead before he opened his mouth. It just doesn't convey an impression of being dynamic and aggressive to look like that."

Lennox offered those thoughts in a recent national survey of 1,139 CEOs, presidents and executive vice presidents that was conducted by a Massachusetts cardiologist. According to the cardiologist, "There's a strong prejudice against overweight executives" in this country. "Not a single executive we interviewed was significantly overweight," he said. "Time and again, they referred to their management teams as Īlean and aggressive.'"

This kind of thinking, of course, is a reflection of our communal compulsion with being thin, which none of us escapes. It's part of the three-piece-suit, dress-for-success, power-tie syndrome, according to psychologist Leonard J. Donk of Abator Consultants of Cupertino. who counsels companies -- ranging from Fortune 500 firms to small start-ups -- on corporate psychology and corporate values. And, says Donk, "It is extremely prejudicial; It is vastly narrow-minded. The profundity of the narrow-mindedness it shows is incredible."

Donk is kind enough to add that the bias against hiring heavy people is usually unconscious -- unlike that very conscious statement made by the former Navistar CEO. But Dank and others who work either with the overweight or with corporations think the bias isn't uncommon.

Neither, as anyone who works in Silicon Valley knows, is the corporate dream of running a lean and mean machine. Donk, who's seen a lot of such companies, says "that's a metaphor we have begun to take literally. But quite frankly, I would rather have a corporation that is hearty and robust and full-bodied and well-rounded rather than one that is lean and mean.

Lean tells me that they're very sparing, which has its wonderful aspects, but also has some real built-in potential drawbacks. As for 'mean,' you can draw your own conclusions from that word."

If the people who run corporations want both their company psyches and their employees to be lean and mean, there are going to be a lot of heavyweight people who'll never be given a chance to prove they can work just as hard and just as well as their slim office mate moving up the corporate ladder.

And that's wrong. As Ronna Kabatznick, the Oakland-based psychological consultant to Weight Watchers International, says, "The impression that overweight people have certain undesirable qualities in common is an enormous disservice to the individual competencies of people. It's similar to the old prejudice against women in the workplace, which was -- on the basis of their sex -- to completely dismiss them."

But why do slim people dismiss fat people?

"Because being fat is perceived as being the fault of the individual, rather than a condition that can't be helped," says Marie Carney, one of the group leaders of the local Weight Watchers at Work program.

Because "there is a tendency to see overweight as a personal statement of weakness, a lack of willpower," says Margaret Novotny, a Santa Clara psychologist whose practice includes patients with eating disorders.

In other societies, of course, being heavy has been seen as a sign of beauty, of strength, of good health. There are a lot of heavy people who wish they'd been born into those societies, I'm sure.

But they weren't, so they live their lives being told that they don't have much of a future; that they have a character flaw; that if they were better people, they'd be thinner people.

There is a lot of evidence that thinness equates with good health, of course, and that can't he ignored, especially in body-conscious California, where there is always someone in a leotard bouncing by.

But, as Donk points out, neither being thin nor being fat is a surefire sign of health. There are too many individual variables. "There are a number of people who are high-weight, but have low cholesterol. There are overweight people who have extremely low blood pressure.

And, as recent studies have shown, obesity isn't always the fat person's fault. In January, medical researchers in Boston and Alabama reported that abnormally low levels of the protein adipsin were linked to the tendency to gain weight. Last year, the New York Times reported two new studies that provided the strongest evidence yet that many people become obese because their bodies burn calories too slowly, rather than because they eat too much.

The tendency to burn calories slowly is inherited, the studies showed. In the New York Times report, Dr. Jules Hirsch, a physician who studies obesity at Rockefeller University in New York City, was quoted as saying: "Obese people are born with a handicap."

He also said that like other disabled people, they'd have to learn to correct for it. That means more exercise and less food. But, Hirsch added, the battle is inevitably a constant and difficult one.

It is not one that would be made any easier by knowing your boss thought you were a misfit. Even if you knew the boss was a prejudiced fool.

Do you think that Don Lennox, the former CEO who said he hates fat people, would ever dream of making such a categorical statement about black people? Probably not. It'd erase all the favorable publicity his company, Navistar, earned last year when it lured away Roy Roberts, who up to then had been the highest-ranking black executive at General Motors.

Funny how people who wouldn't dream of showing most prejudices don't mind knocking the fat, though. It makes you wonder how long it will take our society to wise up, how long it will be before fat people will be valued as the individuals they are, and lured away into top corporate jobs, not dismissed out of hand.

Write Judy Neumon at 750 Ridder Park Dr., San Jose 95190, or call (408) 920-5640.