Women more likely to marry, land jobs after taking GLP-1s

First impressions matter. And when it comes to women's bodyweight, these impressions might have lasting social and economic consequences.  

New research by economist Rebecca Diamond found an increase in marriage among single women and an increase in employment rates among unemployed women after they started taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. Diamond says the pattern suggests that at least part of the female obesity penalty — the social and financial costs women bear due to their body size — is linked to first impressions. 

“When you look at women before versus after taking these, how is their life changing?” said the Martin Feldstein Professor of Economics. “The thing that sort of jumps most strongly off the page is this increase in marriage and partnership.” 

In the working paper, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Diamond compared the marriage and employment rates of women on GLP-1 drugs to a control group of women who wanted to take the drugs but hadn’t yet started.  

Among women who were single, the likelihood that they would marry or move in with a partner increased by as much 28.6 percentage points after 1.5 years on the drug, she found. Similarly, women who were unemployed increased their likelihood of landing a job by 26.9 percentage points after 1.5 years of taking a GLP-1. 

Diamond became interested in researching this topic after a conversation with a friend who took GLP-1 medications for weight loss. The friend confided that she felt a stark difference in how people treated her before and after losing weight. 

“It was almost a passing comment, but it gave me the curiosity of, ‘Huh, is there any research on the economic and social implications of these drugs?’” Diamond recalled. “I did a quick lit review, and I couldn’t really find anything. Then I dug into it.”  

Diamond looked at data from the Understanding America Study, housed at the University of Southern California, which collects quarterly participant responses on GLP-1 use, employment status, marriage status, body-mass index (BMI), health, wellbeing, mood, loneliness, and other factors.  

Her research focused on women, because the sample size of men taking GLP-1s was too small to draw significant conclusions, she said. 

While past studies have shown a link between bodyweight and job and relationship outcomes for women, the recent rise of GLP-1 drugs has created a new empirical setting for researchers like Diamond. Data on weight can be difficult to interpret due to potentially correlating factors like health, family background, and local opportunity, which also impact the rates at which people marry and get jobs, Diamond said.  

“There hasn’t been a great setting to disentangle weight from these other causal things,” she said. “GLP-1s help with that because you take these drugs and within a year your weight is pretty different.” 

But what if the rise in romance isn’t due to discrimination, but to other factors like women feeling happier and more motivated to date after weight loss? Not wanting to rule out the idea, Diamond looked at participants’ responses about depression, loneliness, and life satisfaction before and after starting GLP-1s. She found that women didn’t report much change in these areas — certainly not enough to explain such a significant increase in marriage rates. 

Plus, Diamond said, if the rise in job rates were due to mood and productivity, women who were already employed before starting GLP-1s would likely be reporting increased hours or promotions. They weren’t.  

“You might expect if you're just more motivated and more excited about taking on new things, you might have seen some increase in those metrics. But we don't see that,” Diamond said. “That's why I think it's more about the first impression margin.”  

In fact, women who were already married or employed before starting GLP-1s did not report significant changes to their relationship or employment status. Diamond believes this is because those women are in environments where they’re being seen as multifaceted people, with factors other than weight taken into consideration. 

“For people who have been in a job a long time, the employer knows whether you’re good at the job; they don’t care about your weight at that point anymore,” Diamond said. “On the partnership margin, your partner cares about more than just your weight; that’s why you are with them. That might respond less than a first impression margin.” 

We’re only beginning to see the effect that GLP-1 drugs will have on society, Diamond said. She is interested in how unequal access to GLP-1 drugs may determine who is able to avoid the social and economic discrimination associated with body size.  

“If everybody else is losing weight and getting jobs, maybe it’s extra stigmatizing to be an overweight person if you can’t afford these drugs,” Diamond said. “Depending on how the ‘new world’ shakes out, if weight is less related to drugs or to people’s negative association with it, maybe it's not so bad. But I think it likely could make it much worse to be an overweight person in this world.”