Does successful work experience mitigate weight‐ and gender‐based employment discrimination in face‐to‐face industrial selling?

An experiment was carried out to evaluate whether or not relevant and successful work experience would mitigate employment discrimination in cases involving women and overweight industrial salespeople. The study was conducted in a salesforce setting and used practicing sales managers as subjects. The results indicate that for obese salespeople, positive work experience improved their fit for a job assignment only when the job was less challenging. In the case of a more challenging assignment, successful experience did not seem to help; non‐obese salespeople, with and without successful experience, were both considered more fit than obese salespeople with successful experience. Men and women were found to be equally fit for both more and less challenging assignments.