The Discomforting Truth About Women’s Success While On Weight Loss Drugs Like Ozempic
Weight loss medications may be changing lives, but they're certainly not changing hearts.
Antonio Guillem | Shutterstock We all know we live in a shallow, judgmental society obsessed with the way people look, but as more and more people lose weight with GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic, it seems we're starting to get data to prove it. And a recent survey of users of these medications revealed a discomforting truth about the way women are perceived in their public lives.
Women reported being treated better by others after losing weight on GLP-1s.
Since we're back in an era where we like to deny basic societal truths, it's become sort of fashionable to deny that fatphobia exists and say that if fat people are treated poorly for being fat, that's their own fault and their own problem. Never mind that treating someone poorly is a choice, and we could all just as easily make a different one.
Anyway! Levity, an online pharmacy that sells GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, recently did a study of 1,000 women in the U.S. and U.K. to ask them about their experiences with the medication. Their questions touched on everything from the ease of accessing the drugs (or lack thereof) to the ways they changed certain health markers like hormone function.
But the unexpected social effects are what truly stand out. By a large margin, women reported being surprised by how differently they're treated after losing weight, and it's hard not to feel like it's a pretty dismal view into human nature.
High numbers of women reported being respected more at work after weight loss.
Decades of studies and statistics have shown that women are consistently held back in the workplace because of their gender. A study conducted by professors at MIT, Yale, and the University of Minnesota found women are 15% less likely to be promoted than men, for example.
This is in part because of what journalist Mary Ann Seighart calls "the authority gap," a persistent perception of women as less trustworthy, which means they're taken less seriously. As Seighart told Forbes, "We tend to assume that a man knows what he's talking about until he proves otherwise. Whereas for women it's all too often the other way round, and as a result, women tend to be underestimated more."
It's easy to imagine that for an overweight woman, this is cranked up several notches. We already tend to stereotype fat people as lazy and incompetent, and often treat them as such. So it's not exactly surprising that Levity found GLP-1s are completely changing women's dynamics at the workplace: 19% of U.S. women said they were more respected professionally, and 10% said they were taken more seriously at work after their GLP-1 weight loss.
And nearly 1 in 10 said they were either promoted or gained access to better job opportunities because of their weight loss. Which is remarkable given that nothing else about them changed besides their size. Imagine going an entire career struggling to get ahead and realizing it was just about how you look the entire time.
Women on GLP-1s also reported being treated differently in dating and social settings.
These shifts carried over outside the workplace to women's social lives. In the U.S., nearly half of the women surveyed said they received more compliments on their appearance after their GLP-1 journey, and 20% said they were taken more seriously in social settings. Interestingly, these numbers were substantially higher in the U.K.
But it's dating and romance that is perhaps most revealing: 27% of women reported receiving more attention in this area, but what's perhaps shocking is that Levity's statistic is not just about people in the dating pool but people in committed relationships, too.
Which suggests something downright dark, a similar but even more hurtful mindbender than the workplace changes: Imagine being in a committed relationship with someone, perhaps for decades, only to find that they suddenly treat you better now that you're thin.
This is nothing surprising, of course—social media is full of people who have had similar experiences. TikTok creator Brooklyn Kennedy went viral in 2023 for describing how "gross" and "demoralizing" it feels to suddenly be found desirable and acceptable only after losing weight, and how shocking she found the realization that so many people's love is, in fact, conditional. "I don't want anything to do with people who love like that," she said through tears. "I cannot wrap my brain around how much you care about bodies that you write off people."
On top of this, GLP-1 users have to deal with criticism in the other direction: Half of Britons and a third of Americans told Levity they've been judged for taking the weight loss drugs, especially if they're of lower income. Social media is likewise full of condemnations of GLP-1 users from both sides of the weight debate. They're either "cheating" at weight loss or betraying the cause of fat acceptance by giving in to internalized fatphobia.
It seems fat people are damned if they do and damned if they don't. But social media diatribes are one thing; conditional love, being devalued and dismissed in material ways because of your size, those are quite another. No wonder, then, that one of the most universal experiences Levity found among GLP-1 users was anxiety about stopping the medications and gaining the weight back. That, in the end, is probably the most revealing statistic of all.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
