[Faculty conversation: Mark Roehling, associate professor of human resource management]
Speaker is Mark Roehling, speaking from his office in South Kedzie Hall: I have very much an interdisciplinary research interest and background and training and practical experience. I started out in human resource management; I went to law school and practiced employment law for eight years, and then went back and got my doctorate in human resource management. So the areas that I get most passionate and interested about doing research tends to combine human resource practices and legal issues and what I view as connected ethical and social policy issues. So the weight discrimination is a good example.
[Roehling’s interest toward weight discrimination cases]
Roehling: How I even got interested in this area and was one of the first people—perhaps the first person in the employment area to focus in on weight discrimination—really drew on the fact that as a lawyer in Michigan, the only state that has a law that prohibits weight discrimination, I was surprised by the studies that showed the extent to which—the few studies that existed—the extent to which weight discrimination had a very, very strong effect.
In other words, in studies that looked at weight bias versus race and gender, the weight effect seemed to be very strong. And in thinking about it, I remembered, I thought back about my days as a lawyer, and I couldn’t recall, even though I knew the law prohibited weight discrimination, I could never recall seeing a case that actually was successfully prosecuted or presented by a plaintiff. So I got into looking into the background and focused on the legal issues associated with weight discrimination and the psychological issues. And that was really my seminal article in the field was back in 1999. I combined an analysis of the empirical evidence of weight discrimination, the legal considerations and how the two intermeshed.
[Roehling’s research and his findings]
Roehling: And what we found was there was a lot more evidence of weight discrimination going on than there is any kind of protection against it. In other words, weight discrimination appears to be a very pervasive phenomenon in the workplace and the existing legal protection, with the exception of Michigan, provides very little protection. And even in Michigan, although as I have been tracking this over the last 12 years, the number of claims is increasing a little.
There are a number of psychological and other barriers that seem to prevent people from successfully going forward with weight discrimination claims. So I do research in a variety of areas related to the extent to which people perceive weight discrimination, articles dealing with what are the policy implications of what we know today about the nature and extent of weight discriminations, evaluating the ethical considerations associated with this phenomenon in the workplace, employers who claim to have high values on employees and respect, and if you have that value, and in light of what we know about the prevalence of weight discrimination, it implies certain obligations to try to avoid committing this and taking steps to prevent it.
[Production by Brian Vernellis, MSU University Relations]