By popular demand

I had a post a couple of years ago about the effect of height and weight on earnings for men and women.  Basically, the pattern seemed to be that for women, being thinner meant higher earnings; for men, earnings were highest in a middle range.  That is, for the purposes of earnings, women couldn't be too thin, but men could.  Recently, someone asked in a comment "What happens if you superimpose the plots for men and women?"  The literal answer is that it would be pretty much unreadable, since I had lines for the height/weight relationship at four different heights for each gender.  Another issue is that I have since decided that the way I constructed the lines (as a function of height, weight, and weight squared) was misleading.  So I went back and computed average earnings of men and women by BMI (rounded to whole numbers).  The numbers are small for some categories, so I show smoothed curves as well the the means.

My previous conclusions about the relationship among women need to be revised:  now it appears that weight doesn't make much difference up to a BMI of about 25 (which is where the official "overweight" range starts); after that it goes with lower earnings.  For men, my previous conclusions were about right--men who are in the official "overweight" range (25-30) earn more than men in the "normal" range (18-25).  Men earn more than women over most of the range, but the difference disappears and is even reversed at the low end.  That is, skinny men appear to earn low incomes, compared with men who weigh more and also to women. 

There are not many men in the lower ranges of BMI--for example, for someone who is 70 inches tall, a BMI of 20 means a weight of 139 pounds.  Still, it is interesting that deviating from the "ideal" weight seems to matter more for men than for women, and that for men being in the "normal" weight range is worse than being in the "overweight" range.