New research shows GLP-1 drugs helped unemployed women land jobs faster — here's what it means for Canadian women

An estimated 3 million Canadian adults are currently taking a GLP-1 drug such as Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro to manage diabetes or control weight, making Canada the second-highest user of the medications globally, according to the Canadian Public Health Association. Roughly 1 in 3 Canadian adults now live with obesity, a share that continues to climb.

Against that backdrop, a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a U.S. non-profit economic research organization, is raising new questions about how weight shapes women’s careers. Harvard economist Rebecca Diamond found that American women who were unemployed when they began taking GLP-1 medications saw a dramatic change in their prospects 18 months later.

Their employment rate rose by nearly 27 percentage points compared with women who wanted to take the medications but had not yet started. For context, Statistics Canada data show the employment-rate gap between Canadian women with only a high school diploma and those with a university degree is about 12.8 percentage points — smaller than the jump Diamond found among American women after they started GLP-1s.

The research does not suggest that losing weight made these women smarter, more capable or better qualified for work. Instead, it raises questions about whether changes in appearance affect how women are perceived by employers.

The financial cost of weight bias in Canada

Long before GLP-1s entered the cultural conversation, Canadian research already showed that weight was shaping women’s place in the workforce.

Women with obesity are 5.3% less likely to be employed than women at a healthy weight; for men, that gap is just 0.3%, according to a 2025 study by BMC Public Health. Nationally, that employment disparity costs Canada an estimated $8.2 billion a year in lost wages. Even when they are employed, women with obesity earn about 4% less annually than their healthy-weight peers, or roughly $1,461 less a year on average. Nationally, that pay gap adds up to nearly $3.8 billion in lost income.

A peer-reviewed study in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, using Canadian population health survey data, found that obesity decreases Canadian women’s probability of employment by about 25 percentage points. The study’s authors state this is comparable to the labour-market impact of a mental health condition or substance-use issue. The authors argue the findings support updating Canadian labour law to explicitly prohibit hiring discrimination based on body weight.

That gap matters because, as it stands, weight is not a protected ground under human rights law anywhere in Canada. Workers who believe they’ve faced weight-based discrimination generally have to argue their case under existing protections, such as disability or sex discrimination, and human rights tribunals have been inconsistent about whether obesity qualifies.

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What the data shows

Diamond’s paper looked at survey data from about 15,000 people in the U.S., comparing women who started taking GLP-1 medications with similar women who wanted to take them but had not yet started. The groups were matched on factors including income, race, body mass index and overall health.

The study also found changes in women’s personal lives. Single women taking GLP-1s were nearly 29 percentage points more likely to get married or move in with a partner than similar women who had not started the medications.