GLP-1s Will Get You a Job and a Boyfriend, Says Science (We Already Knew That)

In the most recent GLP-1 news, a new study out of Harvard found that women are more likely to land a job and find a partner while on the drugs — because of course they are.

I don't say that to be snarky, more that weight has never really been just a health thing for women. It's always doubled as currency, whether we wanted it to or not, and now there's a paper with Harvard's name on it more or less proving it.

Economist Rebecca Diamond tracked thousands of women through the Understanding America Study and found that single women starting a GLP-1 for weight loss were 29 percentage points more likely to be married or living with a partner within a year and a half, and women who weren't working when they started were 27 points more likely to be employed by then, putting in nearly ten more hours a week.

But the part that's hard to shake is what didn't change: women who were already partnered stayed partnered, already-employed women got no raises or promotions, and these women didn't get healthier, either. Self-reported health, depression, and loneliness barely moved. Diamond didn't sugarcoat the title of her own paper, "the female obesity penalty."

The same scrutiny shows up on the other end, too. Ariana Grande's body has become its own headline, over and over, and we're told not to comment on women's bodies, which I mostly agree with, until you're actually worried about one. There's a difference between judging a woman for shrinking and noticing that shrinking has a floor, and nobody's quite figured out how to say the second thing without sounding like the first.

This study didn't tell women anything new; it just proved we were never being paranoid.