Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer.

Roko

Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer. — LessWrong

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I think that the reason that people don't sell good clothing for fat women is the intersection of existing manufacturers not wanting to sell clothing for fat women, because doing so would lower their status, and fat women don't want to buy good clothing from exclusively for fat women retailers, because doing so would lower their status. I wish I could see a way to take advantage of this market opportunity. Does anyone have any ideas?

NancyLebovitz16y20

I think the level of prejudice is so high that you'd need a good bit of money and a lot of dedication to do it on the large scale. I keep thinking it would take ten million dollars to start a mass production clothing company, but this is only a guess. Does anyone here have a well-founded estimate?

As for the smaller scale, here's some of what's going on. If you're not up for starting the big company, you might find a small business which is worth investing in.

How sure are you that fat women won't shop at a places that offer good clothing only for fat women?... (read more)

11[anonymous]16y

Status is part of it, but there's a perfectly good statistical explanation too. There is much higher variance among fat people than among thin people. It's the long tail of the distribution. So plus sizes are much more approximate. It's more likely that the clothes won't fit. This also makes the return on each additional size lower -- there may be a lot of plus-size women generally, but they're spread out enough that there aren't a lot of size 16s specifically. I don't think that accounts for everything, but it is part of it. You're already seeing more good plus-size fashion, I think, of necessity. It's coming.

5Alicorn16y

Maybe it would make sense to sell clothes that are very easy to "let out" at home. I could imagine, for instance, a skirt that you could add extra pleating to with snaps or buttons inside the waistband. You could put it on the rack with all the buttons done, so the customer doesn't need to be seen shopping in a "fat section" and the exact same style would be of a type open to thin women, and it could triple in possible size if you undid them all without needing to be made of an unflattering stretchy fabric. If one needed to undo some but not all of the pleats, the choice of which to undo would be a nifty bit of extra customization. Man, now I want a skirt like that. Or four.

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Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer.

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