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Bias in radiology resident selection against the obese and unattractive?

by abhisuri97 on 11/12/20, 10:17 PM with 147 comments

• by hn_throwaway_99 on 11/13/20, 2:07 AM

  I'm sure I've commented something similar on another article, but as a rather unattractive person, can we please give these kind of studies a rest. Quite literally every single fucking study I've read that looks at this always says the exact same thing: being unattractive is correlated with lower salary, or being less likely to get a promotion, or being less likely to have other people think you are "nice", etc. etc. I just feel like being unattractive is correlated with about every negative outcome one can think of, and at this point I just want to scream: I get it! Being ugly sucks. You don't have to tell me twice (or five thousand times).

• by ineedasername on 11/12/20, 10:42 PM

  My impression from similar studies is that we tend to discriminate against people who don't look like us, not necessarily based (just) on perceived negative characteristics.

  So, I wouldn't be surprised if obese/unattractive people still discriminates against those perceived negative characteristics, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that discrimination was to a lower degree than when the person doing the discrimination isn't obese/unattractive.

• by jungletime on 11/12/20, 11:16 PM

  What about mean looking people? Surely nobody wants to be around a mean looking person. They might do well in prison or during the draft for war. But otherwise, I'm sure they get ostracized....which just boils up their meanness. So that one day, they might be plotting to ruin Christmas from their cave overlooking Whoville.

• by alexpotato on 11/13/20, 1:33 AM

  I was at a dinner once with several medical residents and they mentioned that at one hospital, the surgical scrubs were color coded by size.

  This meant that everyone knew which female residents were a larger size and which male residents were a smaller size. Everyone knew this which just added a distraction to an already information overloaded profession.

  In a profession where the goal is identifying the people with top competencies, it never made sense to me who signed off on ordering that particular type of scrubs. I would have thought everyone should wear the same color or at least have the colors indicate something useful e.g. speciality.

• by jsnk on 11/12/20, 11:28 PM

  I like studies like these because it shows different types of discriminations the societies are comfortable with vs some other types of discriminations which are not only uncomfortable, but have severe legal consequences.

• by newfeatureok on 11/12/20, 10:49 PM

  Would you really want a doctor who is obese? A mildly overweight doctor, sure. But obese?

  The reality is, if you have a list of doctors and their pictures and know nothing of them except for their appearance I highly doubt anyone would pick the obese person as their first pick.

  It’s just reality. Someone capable of going through medical school is capable of reducing their weight to being merely overweight as opposed to obese.

  People going on “yeah if they know their stuff” are missing the point. You don’t know if they know their stuff at all.

  As for unattractive, yes that’s bad.

• by scarmig on 11/12/20, 11:27 PM

  I was disappointed they didn't look at height as well, which is particularly relevant for men in both their pay and career progression.

• by wbraun on 11/12/20, 10:59 PM

  Reading through the paper, I think the real buried lead here is that the reviewers discriminated in favor of selecting black and hispanic applicants, with a larger effect size than anything analyzed but test scores and attractive vs unattractive (not neutral vs unattractive). This includes obesity, grades / class rank, research publications, and honor society membership.

  At least your appearance and test scores are mutable characteristics.

• by ponker on 11/12/20, 10:46 PM

  Everyone everywhere discriminates against the obese and unattractive.

• by justsomeuser on 11/13/20, 8:12 AM

  Breaking news: “attractive people are attractive”.

  It’s good to get the data but surely they knew what the results would be?

  Next up: “The sun is bright”.

• by mhb on 11/13/20, 2:01 AM

  Do obese or unattractive radiologists' patients have different outcomes?

• by omarhaneef on 11/12/20, 10:54 PM

  Thank goodness this doesn’t happen in finance.

• by 11thEarlOfMar on 11/13/20, 12:27 AM

  Yes, all of us need to be aware that we have biases that impact decisions we make that affect the lives of others. Nonetheless, being obese or unattractive is a surmountable obstacle. One may have to take more interviews, but will ultimately find work. Moreover, those who are neither obese nor unattractive almost certainly have their own disadvantages they had to overcome. It's rare to find people who are successful and literally had no obstacles in life. Obstacles are an opportunity to learn persistence, diligence, and what we are and aren't suited for. Having zero obstacles might simply mean that a person simply has few ambitions.

  For me, the discussion ultimately leads to two points:

  First, do we believe that the playing field must be leveled for all from birth. If the answer to that is Yes, then you're probably in favor of socialism to some degree, such that opportunity is provided in equal measure to all citizens, regardless of the circumstances they are born into. Personally, I don't find this realistic, but I accept that there are people who do and that's fine.

  Second, if you don't feel the playing field should be leveled from birth, but rather that every citizen is born with a set of advantages and disadvantages, then the question is, do we need to afford special attention to those whose disadvantages are insurmountable? Regardless of whether you're born dull or smart, attractive or unattractive, African or Asian American, most Americans can find success in life by making more good decisions than bad and persistently working towards the life they'd like. We have had a 2 term black president, have a black woman vice president, an openly gay presidential candidate, an openly gay cabinet member, multiple black Fortune 500 CEOs, openly gay entertainers, and many wealthy black athletes and entertainers. Achieving success is possible for all, some have to work harder at it than others.

  But is such success possible for all? It's obvious to me that the answer is no. I am not referring to those with disabilities, but rather those whose life circumstances guarantee they have zero chance at success as defined in the US today. A kind of worst case situation might be a child born into a one parent household, parent is addicted, and neglects them. They live in the worst school district in the city, and in an area ruled by street gangs. What forces would enable an 8 year old in such circumstances to somehow push through all of that adversity and actually wind up in a college earning a degree that enables him to get a steady professional job? Or expose him to an opportunity to learn a trade, such as electrician or plumber? Or work up the ladder in food service or retail companies? In many cases, he's exposed to drugs, persistent gang violence, likely frightened for his life most of the time and learning that survival means physically subduing others or being subdued by them. Many life lessons about discipline, team work, 'social skills', and earning what you want are not modeled to such a child, and I'd not be surprised to learn there are 100s of thousands of them in America right now.

  My view is that if we are going to maintain the approach that hey, we all have advantages and disadvantages, we must recognize that groups faced with insurmountable obstacles to success need an effective accommodation or we are failing overall as a society.

• by roflc0ptic on 11/12/20, 11:30 PM

  Going through this latest round of job searching, rapport building/interview success has been so much more difficult over zoom/etc. It makes me wonder how much of my past success has been from being a tall-ish, attractive-but-not-so-much-it's-threatening, pleasingly built dude, instead of my apparent technical competence. All of my non-verbal rapport building skills really fall flat, and the fact that I'm bumbling, a little haphazard, kind of anxious is less charming quirk and more off putting anti-feature.

  I'm really pretty good at Scala, though.

• by htnsao on 11/13/20, 1:38 PM

  Not in the US but having hired quite a few fat guys over the years (agriculture, construction) I can say that obesity has always turned out to be a sign of them being lazy and untrustworthy, even in management positions. All drinkers mostly.

  Sadly one of them died recently at ~40, turns out he had an underlying heart condition since birth which might explain alot about his past performance.

  Having said that I did know a particularly fat and ugly friend that has a great personality and was quite successful running her own small publishing business. Smarts and drive can shine through no matter what you look like.

  If you can't get a job, start your own. Once you start seeing opportunities instead of wages you'll probably never go back.

• by m0zg on 11/12/20, 11:44 PM

  As a high BMI individual, I'm fully in support of instituting minimal hiring and promotion quotas for fat people. Given that there's "obesity epidemic" going on, I propose we set it at 50% to ensure that there's no systemic discrimination. No fewer than 50% of people on corporate boards should be fat, also. /s

• by 1996 on 11/12/20, 10:55 PM

  Previous discussion about the same effect in the legal system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409

  Personally, I find it very surprising most hackers have such a disdain for physical beauty, given the huge ROI for every $ invested - reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth.

  Still, only a few CEO seems to have taken action to maximize their appearance, and mostly against their premature baldness. Even that is kind of taboo - while studying before an interview is not, even if it will certainly have a much lower ROI.

  Why not hack your appearance?

  There are many scientific studies documenting all that, but we ignore them. For an example of all the known variables, check for ex table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson’s correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes":

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/

  If you want more example for a given variable, for example the effect of adiposity (we know it's quadratic), read one of the original papers:

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/

  All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago:

  Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772

  So why do we keep ignoring it, while focusing on other signals like which search engine (or operating systen) you use?

• by runawaybottle on 11/13/20, 3:15 AM

  You are free to judge someone’s looks, we all do.

  What you are not free to do is judge someone’s looks and use that as a criteria in the hiring process in jobs where beauty is not a relevant criteria.

  If this study proved that X number of over-weight or unattractive people applied, but were rejected at a noticeable clip, how is this not legally actionable?

  Bringing it back to tech for a second. We all acknowledge the pipeline problem with women at tech companies. But, in my experience, a lot of your startups are really white across the various job disciplines (from the CEO down to the interns). That stuff is not an accident either, would love to see some studies on this.

  I suppose we all need to do a good job filling out the optional questions at the end of a job application that identifies your ethnic background. Where is all this data and how do we get it, and is it possible to dig down into the tech center and really see what’s going on?