Obese teenage boys may be paid up to 18 per cent less than their normal weight peers once they enter the job market, a new research has found.
Swedish researchers compared extensive information from Sweden, the UK and the US and found that men who are already obese as teenagers could grow to earn up to 18 per cent less than their peers of normal weight.
The study analysed large-scale data of 145,193 Swedish-born brothers who enlisted in the Swedish National Service for mandatory military service between 1984 and 1997.
This included information gathered by military enlistment personnel and certified psychologists about the soldiers' cognitive skills (such as memory, attention, logic and reasoning) and their non-cognitive skills (such as motivation, self-confidence, sociability and persistence) which can affect their productivity.
Tax records were then used to gauge the annual earnings of this group of men, who were between 28 and 39 years old in 2003.
The Swedish results were further compared with data from the British National Child Development Study and the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979.
Previous research has shown that only obese young women pay a price when they enter the labour market.
The new study is the first to show how this pattern also emerges among men who were already overweight or obese as teenagers, but does not hold true for males who gain excessive weight only later in life.
"To put this figure into perspective, the estimated return to an additional year of schooling in Sweden is about six per cent. The obesity penalty thus corresponds to almost three years of schooling, which is equivalent to a university bachelor's degree," the authors said.
A similar pattern also emerged when the researchers used the specific data sets from the UK and the US. This confirms that the wage penalty is unique to men who are already overweight or obese early in their lives, researchers said.
The researchers, including Petter Lundborg of Lund University, Paul Nystedt of Jonkoping University and Dan-olof Rooth of Linneas University and Lund University, ascribe the wage penalty partly to obese adolescents' often possessing lower levels of cognitive and non-cognitive skills.
This is consistent with the evidence linking body size during childhood and adolescence with bullying, lower self-esteem and discrimination by peers and teachers, the researchers said.
The study is published in Springer's journal Demography.
