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Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea

BACKGROUND: Little is known about the gender-specific mechanisms through which education is associated with weight status in societies that have experienced a rapid rise in their obesity rates. This study extends previous literature by examining how the link between education and weight status opera...

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Autor principal: Lee, Yeonjin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5696721/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29157251
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12939-017-0685-9
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author Lee, Yeonjin
author_facet Lee, Yeonjin
author_sort Lee, Yeonjin
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Little is known about the gender-specific mechanisms through which education is associated with weight status in societies that have experienced a rapid rise in their obesity rates. This study extends previous literature by examining how the link between education and weight status operates within the structure of gender relations in South Korea where huge gender differences have been observed in the educational inequalities in weight status. METHODS: Using the Korean National Health Survey (N = 17,947) conducted in 2008–2012 conditional quantile regression models were estimated to assess the associations between education and body weight distribution. The mean difference in the predicted probabilities of perceiving body image as average was compared by educational attainment for women and men while setting all other covariates at their means. RESULTS: Highly educated women were more likely to utilize their human capital to obtain slender body shape and the relationship was not mediated by economic resources. In contrast, education was positively associated with being overweight and obesity among men, for whom behaviors promoting healthy weight often conflict with a collective ideology at work that strongly supports long work hours and heavy alcohol consumption. Furthermore, Korean men were more likely to under-perceive their body size than Korean women, that is, overweight men tend to consider themselves to be of ‘average’ weight, regardless of their educational attainment. CONCLUSIONS: Current study found that gender inequalities in social status in South Korea operate to affect the relationship between education and weight status among men and women in unique ways. Weight status can be socially patterned by the interplay between education, economic, and behavioral resources within the structure of gender relations.
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spelling pubmed-56967212017-12-01 Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea Lee, Yeonjin Int J Equity Health Research BACKGROUND: Little is known about the gender-specific mechanisms through which education is associated with weight status in societies that have experienced a rapid rise in their obesity rates. This study extends previous literature by examining how the link between education and weight status operates within the structure of gender relations in South Korea where huge gender differences have been observed in the educational inequalities in weight status. METHODS: Using the Korean National Health Survey (N = 17,947) conducted in 2008–2012 conditional quantile regression models were estimated to assess the associations between education and body weight distribution. The mean difference in the predicted probabilities of perceiving body image as average was compared by educational attainment for women and men while setting all other covariates at their means. RESULTS: Highly educated women were more likely to utilize their human capital to obtain slender body shape and the relationship was not mediated by economic resources. In contrast, education was positively associated with being overweight and obesity among men, for whom behaviors promoting healthy weight often conflict with a collective ideology at work that strongly supports long work hours and heavy alcohol consumption. Furthermore, Korean men were more likely to under-perceive their body size than Korean women, that is, overweight men tend to consider themselves to be of ‘average’ weight, regardless of their educational attainment. CONCLUSIONS: Current study found that gender inequalities in social status in South Korea operate to affect the relationship between education and weight status among men and women in unique ways. Weight status can be socially patterned by the interplay between education, economic, and behavioral resources within the structure of gender relations. BioMed Central 2017-11-21 /pmc/articles/PMC5696721/ /pubmed/29157251 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12939-017-0685-9 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Lee, Yeonjin
Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea
title Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea
title_full Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea
title_fullStr Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea
title_full_unstemmed Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea
title_short Slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in South Korea
title_sort slender women and overweight men: gender differences in the educational gradient in body weight in south korea
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5696721/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29157251
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12939-017-0685-9
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