Unathletic men earn less money

I did a multiple regression analysis using the ATHLETIC variable along with dummy variables for age, educational attainment and region.

Men who said they were in the two least athletic categories suffered a $7,000 loss of income (t=-2.4). In comparison, there was a $13,000 gain in income for having a bachelor’s degree, and a $35,000 gain income for having a graduate degree. This is based on a relatively small sample size of 567 men who reported working full time. This is one of the higher coefficients to appear in my income analyses.

Surprisingly, men who placed themselves in the most athletic category didn’t have any increased income with respect to their peers of average athleticism. This is very similar to what I found with men’s height using the 1991 National Health Interview Survey. Men who were shorter than average had lower income, but men who were taller than average didn’t have higher income than men of average height. And like the athleticism coefficient, being 5’7” or shorter was the income equivalent to losing approximately half of a college degree.

Do businesses discriminate against men who look unathletic (as well as men who are short)? Or does this have something to do with adolescent experiences?

Comments

[Peter]

Unathletic men are more likely to be obese than are men with a higher degree of athleticism. There's a chicken-and-egg question - are they obese because they're unathletic or are they unathletic because they're obese - but that's not really relevant. What is relevant is the fact that obesity is more common in the lower income groups. You now can see the tie-in between being unathletic and having a lower income.

[spungen]

There's probably a modest popularity benefit to being athletic enough to participate in company softball teams, pick-up basketball games with the other guys, etc. Men who are moderately athletic are probably more likely to follow professional and college sports, an easy source of conversation and bonding with bosses, co-workers and clients.

[Dan]

I haven't thought through the details, but there may be something akin to a Rothschild effect going on here.

If short is unattractive, shorter adults will have worse mating options, and they will choose less intelligent mates. This would cause shortness to be correlated with lower intelligence. This in turn would cause lower wages among short men, without any discrimination.

There are some obvious ways to test this (simply regressing intelligence on short might disprove it).
Just a thought.