By Matthew Boyle | Bloomberg
Women taking obesity drugs aren’t just lowering their weight — they’re boosting their chances of landing a job.
That’s the key finding of new study by Harvard University economics professor Rebecca Diamond, who told Bloomberg News the research was inspired by an offhand comment from a female friend about how people treated her differently after she went on a GLP-1.
The paper, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, found that the employment rate for women who weren’t working before taking the medicine rose 27 percentage points after about a year and a half.
“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 concluded. “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.” In other words, those who were already working weren’t more likely to get a better job.
Diamond analyzed UCS’s Understanding America Study, an online panel of more than 10,000 US 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 GLP-1s but hadn’t yet started. The paper didn’t delve into the impact on unemployed or unattached men, as women are much more likely to take GLP-1s and the sample size of men in the panel was smaller.
While existing research shows that heavier women earn and work less, it’s hard to distinguish correlation from causation, as body weight is also impacted by one’s family background, education and other factors.
“The unresolved question is therefore not only whether weight matters,” Diamond wrote in the paper, “but where it matters: inside existing jobs and relationships, or at the moment new jobs and relationships are formed.”
Using the USC panel, Diamond created a control group out of women who expressed interest in obesity drugs but hadn’t taken them yet. Not only were non-employed women who started on a GLP-1 more likely to land a job, but single women taking the medication were also more likely, by equal measure, to get married or start living with a partner over the time period surveyed.
What didn’t change for GLP-1 takers, though, was their self-reported life satisfaction.
“Despite life looking on paper better, it doesn’t seem like there’s some subjective wellbeing improvement that is going along with it,” Diamond said in an interview.
Diamond couldn’t determine whether women who started taking weight-loss drugs eventually earned more, as there wasn’t enough data in the panel over the two-year time period studied. But it was clear that the women who started taking GLP-1s had higher household incomes than those who were merely interested in the drugs, thanks largely to their employed spouses who could pay for them.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in eight Americans has tried a GLP-1, and that number is expected to grow significantly in the coming years, aided by expanding insurance coverage and availability of the medication in pill form. The global market for GLP-1 drugs could reach $190 billion by 2035, more than double 2025 levels, according to an April report from Morgan Stanley Research. In recent months, weight-loss pills from Eli Lilly & Co. and Novo Nordisk A/S have been approved in the US, bringing GLP-1 medications within reach for people unwilling to inject themselves.
As more people find success on weight-loss medications, they should be able to narrow the employment gap between overweight and average-weight job seekers. However, Diamond notes, “for the people that are already lower income or less well resourced, you could imagine that exacerbating inequality.”