Although the Americans With Disabilities Act wasn’t originally intended to protect people without perfect, tanned bodies, its definition of a disability leaves room for interpretation:
“An individual with a disability is defined by the ADA as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment. The ADA does not specifically name all of the impairments that are covered.”
This act has been applied to physical characteristics, mostly (but rarely) in cases dealing with obesity (and, in one case, a toothless individual whose dentures were painful). In one obesity case, the judge invoked the logic of the halo effect, noting the disabling nature of obesity in employment in “a society that all too often confuses ‘slim’ with ‘beautiful’ or ‘good.’””
However, some proponents of legal protection for appearance-based legislation make another claim. Just as Title VII and the Age and Disability Acts protect people from irrational biases about their worth as employees based on their race, gender, and age, they believe that unattractive people face the same irrational biases.
The favorable bias toward attractive people also endows them with benefits in situations that seem entirely inappropriate. They receive lighter sentences from juries and better wages in positions where their attractiveness has little to no impact on their productivity. Even as schoolchildren they are doted upon more by teachers, which impacts their career trajectories. And all this bias frequently operates without people being aware of it.
We’re told not to judge a book by its cover. But we do. All the time. And everyone’s life is affected by it.
