Study: Body image is not just white woman’s burden

As the mass media continues to bombard us with airbrushed images of stick-thin supermodels, it’s no surprise that scores of women in the United States now judge their own bodies by those standards — and often start hating themselves in the process.

Psychologists have increasingly turned their attention to this phenomenon of “body dissatisfaction,” particularly as a growing body of research suggests that poor body image can strongly predict for depression and eating disorders such as anorexia.

But a big problem, write University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists in the journal Psychological Bulletin, is that the bulk of body dissatisfaction research has focused on white women in western societies. Such a bias, they say, could have implications for women of color with eating disorders or depression who might be receiving treatments originally designed for white populations.

“Pop culture as well as researchers have been defining [body dissatisfaction] as a white woman’s issue. Some even call it the ‘golden girl problem,'” says Shelly Grabe, a UW–Madison postdoctoral fellow of psychology and lead author of the study. “But our research suggests that is not the case at all.”

Grabe and co-author Janet Hyde, a UW–Madison professor of psychology and women’s studies, pored through the literature and, using a bird’s eye view approach known as “meta-analysis,” compiled data from every psychological study that has explored body dissatisfaction issues among women of different ethnicities. Not surprisingly, only 98 out of 6,000 existing studies fit their criteria.

When Grabe analyzed the cumulative trends of those 98 studies, she found that contrary to conventional thinking, body dissatisfaction levels do not differ among white, Asian American or Hispanic women. And white women are only a little more dissatisfied with their bodies than African American women are, Grabe found. Around 42,000 women were collectively surveyed in the 98 studies Grabe analyzed.

Of course, sources of dissatisfaction — whether with the face, chest or other body parts — vary from ethnic group to ethnic group, with cultural and societal factors playing a big role. But Grabe’s work demonstrates that any woman of any color can feel anxiety about the size and shape of her body.

“The findings suggest not only that highlighting body dissatisfaction as a white woman’s issue is problematic but that researchers should not be lumping all women of color into a ‘nonwhite’ category when investigating body image,” says Grabe. “I am hoping that this type of work might influence researchers to include more women of color in their studies, and might one day influence providers to pay heed to body dissatisfaction issues among patients of different ethnicities.”