Provide chairs that can support larger bodies and that don’t have arm rests, and leave space around tables and chairs so that everyone can navigate with ease and not feel cramped. Group leaders should ensure that lab ergonomic designs suit all body shapes and sizes by asking members what furniture they would like. They often think it’s easier to suffer in silence, he says. Rosencrans says that some of his colleagues hesitate to ask for such accommodations because they fear that people in the department - and even their principal investigator - will blame them for their fatness. Padded or gel-filled floor mats can help, and increase comfort for anyone standing for hours at a fume hood or laboratory bench. The more a person weighs, the more strain their joints are under, Rosencrans says, which mean knees and ankles can tire quickly. Other aspects include changes to the physical environment. As a result, he’s managed to decrease the amount of talk about food and bodies in his environment - a change that also benefits those with food sensitivities and eating disorders. He also refuses to pass judgement on food choices or eating habits. He makes a point never to compliment weight loss or comment on another person’s body. Such changes would also help to make science accessible to everyone.Ĭreating a workplace that is accepting of all body sizes is straightforward, says Robert Rosencrans, a neuroendocrinology MD–PhD student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham - by bucking the narrative around weight, health and morality. Making adjustments to workplace attitudes and using set-ups that would improve a researcher’s everyday life and productivity are not huge asks, Newbold says (see ‘Welcoming all weights to workspaces’). Misperceptions that body size is a matter of willpower help to fuel bias against overweight people, a pervasive but harmful view that damages not only careers and productivity, but also mental and physical health. Tyrol, Pausé and others have been working as part of a small but lively movement to encourage scientists to welcome people of all body sizes. What’s more, many of her colleagues justify their bias using such reasoning as ‘obesity is unhealthy’. “Academics love to pay lip service to diversity, less so to size diversity,” Tyrol says. The fact that weight bias hasn’t received much consideration is no shock to Kate Tyrol, a cyberpsychologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. Whereas searching for Twitter hashtags such as #queerinSTEM and #blackinSTEM reveals thousands of tweets, #fatinSTEM and #fatinacademia each yield only a single message - a sign that even those researchers who are comfortable with their size face significant stigma. Yet weight bias - defined as prejudice towards people with higher body weight - has received little attention. (Pausé was interviewed for this article before her sudden death in March.) In a world overflowing with messages about the dangers of obesity and never-ending lists of ways to lose weight, it should be no surprise that weight bias is as prominent in science as in every other field, said Cat Pausé, a sociologist and fat activist who was at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Stigma against fatness is everywhere, and science is no exception. “People don’t take me as seriously as a bigger person,” says Newbold, who is now a PhD candidate in plant pathology at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. It was Newbold’s first introduction to science’s size bias. The shop offered to order the larger size for Newbold, but it would take time - time that they didn’t have, and which their classmates didn’t have to worry about. “These are relatively small things that demonstrate that you belong there.”
“It felt very exclusionary,” Newbold says.
Without a lab coat, they couldn’t start their chemistry class. But they couldn’t find one that fitted at the campus shop, which stocked only up to a size XL. Theo (Chelsea) Newbold’s first chemistry assignment should have been easy: buy a white laboratory coat. Theo (Chelsea) Newbold is doing a PhD in plant pathology, focusing on maize (corn).
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