Thin = successful?
They're just too fat for this job. "Oha! Sounds like one of those devastating judgments that model mom Heidi Klum likes to send her" girls "to shame in the corner, if that's not the word" you. "And that one The sentence did not fall on a television show, as Ines Imdahl, a graduate psychologist and founder of the trend and market research institute "Rheingold Salon" knows how to report, but in a "casting" in the real business world.Wanted: "Germany's Next Chief Executive Officer "- it was about filling a Dax-listed company's leadership, a top position in the media industry - skills, qualifications, past achievements? No matter, all of this was swept away with a single disrespectful phrase to say that, and what is the result?
"You are just too fat for this job."
"Men say that to women who dare to apply for the board or the board," says Ines Imdahl. "Women who want to go to the top have to be thinner than the average, preferably weigh less than a dress size requires 38. Look at Marissa Meyer, Yahoo CEO, or Christine Lagarde, IMF head, slimming expresses self-discipline and control and implies the qualification to be in control of a team. "
Imdahl's thesis "thinner = more successful" was underpinned by the findings of the latest study on women and careers conducted by the "Rheingold Salon" and the "Pro Quote" alliance. Thousands of women were interviewed, 20 of them with considerable careers and good jobs on the way to very good jobs. "Qualifying these women is out of the question," said Ines Imdahl, "but almost everyone says that at a certain point in their careers, they are often confronted with the fact that our culture rejects the heavier or even full-bodied women." Psychologically, this could be explained by the fact that overweight laziness, immobility or even disease would be associated.
Another explanation for the ugly career equation gives Rebekka Reinhard, philosopher and author of the book "Beautiful! Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful live - a philosophical instructions for use": "Being thin in our society is now equated with a moral achievement and with the ability to perform, women who are fatter are presumed to be out of their means, not getting the best out of themselves. "
Slimmer women earn even more: In 2010, a study by the University of Florida showed that women weighing around 12 kilograms earn on average 11,360 euros more a year than women of average weight, compared to around 67 kilos in Germany with a size of 1 , 65 meters. By the way, according to this study, the opposite is true for men - on average, they earn less if they are rather thin. How can it be that women have to thin themselves to be equal in the boardrooms?
On the one hand, this development is closely linked with the common ideals of beauty, and they follow the simple pattern: what is scarce is sought after. In the '50s, Marilyn Monroe's female curves were worshiped because so soon after the war hunger and want were the prevailing reality. Today, in times of abundance, at least in the western world, the supermajority is idolized. "The body mass index has fallen another six to ten kilos in the last ten years," says Ines Imdahl, "Heidi Klum, Claudia Schiffer or Angelina Jolie are all a lot easier today than they were ten years ago." And these unhealthy body ideals work into the professional world. On the other hand, women use body control to compensate for the impotent feeling of bumping against the so-called glass ceiling. Say, in the same qualification the race to lose the job against the male competitor in principle. It's a substitute control mechanism: you control what's in your own power - its weight - to prove that you've got everything under control.
"The career woman makes herself thin - and seems less threatening"
Another problem is the lack of healthy role models. "We live today in a visual culture, no longer in a literate culture," says philosopher Rebekka Reinhard, "and for women dominate two role models - that of the caring mother or the sweet or sexy girl For female careerists, it through the create a glass ceiling, we still have no picture, they are considered big unknowns, before the men are afraid.As a consequence, the career woman makes thin so that she is perceived as a hybrid somewhere between a man and a woman and thus appears less threatening.
Anyone who clicks through the manageable number of women on the Internet on the Internet (currently the quota is 17.2 percent according to the initiative "FidAR - Women on Supervisory Boards"), states that almost all are wiry and almost none of them are feminine. "Just like Angela Merkel, she has escaped, comes in the same pantsuit as a man, so that she is no longer vulnerable at this level," said psychologist Ines Imdahl. When Merkel once showed female attributes, her low-cut décolleté at the opening of the Oslo Opera in 2008, could the Queen at the same time abdicate, no one would have noticed.
Suits businesswoman Merkel or super slim business woman Marissa Meyer, who returned to her CEO armchair with lightning speed after the birth of her child and shortly afterwards posed for the US "Vogue": Are these the only (pre-) pictures we have of a woman having fun on a steep career? That's too little, we need more variety!
They provide, for example, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg and the image agency Getty Images with their campaign "LeanIn-Collection": They show pictures of normal (and normal weight) women who show leadership in the job as well as in private. "That's where we have to go," says philosopher Rebecca Reinhard, "we need to bring authenticity back to value so that nobody has to play a role anymore, neither men nor women." A strategic non-conformism would help us to break away from these stereotypes. " And psychologist Ines Imdahl emphasizes the desire of many influential women who say, "I do not want to pay the price to sacrifice my femininity completely to get on the board, but I want to be there as a woman, not a man."
Philosophers and psychologists agree that only a large number of new images could counteract the underweight ideal with something healthy. Prerequisite: the female quota. "I do not believe that women are able to achieve equality solely through achievement," said Reinhard. "We should not act on the defensive, but on an attitude of self-empowerment, then we will be many and may look different."
