Laidlaw Scholars Conference

Friday 17 October 2025

Over summer 2025, Hannah Taylor joined the Eqweighty team as a Laidlaw Scholar. The Laidlaw Scholarship is a prestigious programme offering the very best students the opportunity to engage in research and leadership through a year-long project. For her project, Hannah worked with us on thinking about weight discrimination and weight inclusivity in fitness and physical activity spaces.

It’s well documented that these spaces - gyms, sports clubs, studios etc. - can be weight exclusionary and can perpetuate weight stigma. This stigma can take multiple forms. It might be assumptions that are made about higher-weight people, their fitness (assumption: poor), their strength (assumption: weak), and their motivations for attending the gym (assumption: weight loss). Or it might be equipment that isn’t inclusive. Or trainers feeling unwilling or unconfident to support higher-weight people as they train. Or it might be imagery or advertisements that perpetuate ideas about what bodies should look like (remember the “Beach Body Ready” Protein World advert from 2015?)

Hannah’s project involved research with fitness professionals to understand their views on weight discrimination and their training in this area. Hannah presented some of her findings at the Laidlaw annual conference in Durham in mid-October 2025 and did the project very proud. We’re analysing the data so watch this space for an academic publication coming soon.