The Indicator from Planet Money - GLP-1 and women, the AI office boom, and RTO: CEO ego?

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

It’s Indicators of the Week (now on YouTube!).On today’s episode: The effect of GLP-1s on women and the workplace; NYC’s once flailing office space is BACK; your boss asking you to come back to the office miiiight be a narcissist. Fact checking by Emma Ferrara and Corey Bridges. Your Next Listen —Why GLP-1s aren't lowering employers' costsConnect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s brand new newsletter — Find our socials, YouTube and more! — For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+ See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Daryan Woods. And joining us today, a man who is cooler than the other side of the pillow, one Cooper Katzvich. Yay. Thank you for having me.

Yes, I'm wearing three fedoras right now if you can't see. Cooler than cool. Now, Cooper, you're here right on time because today is... Indicator is Indicator of the week. It's the day of the week where we talk about our favorite numbers from the the news. And today we're covering GLP-1s and women's employment. Office space in New York City. So hot right now.

And is your CEO a narcissist? All of that after the break. It's indicators of the week. Waylon Wong. Why don't you go first? My indicator is 26.9 percentage points. That is the increase in the employment rate for women who are not working and then take GLP ones to lose weight. And this number comes from a new working paper by Harvard, a Rebecca Diamond. 27 percentage points. That's quite a result.

Yeah. I mean, the numbers definitely made a lot of waves among economists this week, and there was some online debate about whether, you know, these numbers are too high. Okay. So how did Rebecca get to this number? So she used a data set of about 10,000 U.S. residents, and she studied two groups. One is women who have started taking a GLP1 to lose weight. The other is women who want to start taking a GLP one but have not yet done so. These two groups are otherwise similar in terms of their income, employment status, their body mass before treatment, and some other factors. And so I guess the issue is whether or not there are kind of unmeasurable factors that might mean that the women that end up going on these GLP ones are different from the ones who didn't.

Yeah, I mean, and this was not like a randomized control trial, right? this was two groups of women who have self-selected to say we are interested in taking GLP-1s to lose weight. But even when you account for that, the analysis produces some pretty dramatic results that people are looking at. Like that 26.9 percentage point increase in the employment rate that is a year and a half after treatment. Okay. So this is maybe an unsurprising but still depressing commentary on how society views women of different sizes. Yeah. And there's a pretty rich body of economic research out there. showing that heavier women work less and earn less. It's, of course, trickier to pin down how much of that disparity is due to body weight discrimination. Rebecca Diamond, who is the

economist at Harvard, who did this study, says her results point to something called a first impression obesity penalty. So if you think about a woman who isn't working, she starts taking a GLP1 and loses weight, and then maybe she makes a really good first impression at a job interview, you know, a better impression than a woman of similar qualifications who is in a larger body. This seems to be a real splash in what I'm sure will be a rich body of research to come. Oh, for sure. Super interesting, especially given the effects are so large.

And I will be watching what research comes out on GLP-1s and how it affects society to come. Now, Cooper, I'm super interested in your indicator. It's about the city that I live in. And also me. And also you. My indicator is one million. That's the square footage that AI companies have leased in both of our cities, New York City, so far this year. We're only in June, but we've already outpaced the total amount of office space leased in all of last year.

I'm having such whiplash because I feel like it was just yesterday when we were like, tumbleweeds are blowing through the empty office spaces in New York. Like, no one's in the office. Yeah. So we're actually in Prairie Country, New York now. So tons of companies did can their offices during the pandemic. There was this whole era of people sending workers home, people were remote, they were hybrid, or the companies just went under. And the peak actually happened way later than I expected in 2024 when 15% around of office space sat empty in New York City.

So not that long ago. Yeah, there were these think pieces about what the empty office space would mean for city's taxes. I imagine local leaders must be happy right now. Yeah, office buildings pay a lot of money in property tax. A report from 2023 says roughly 10% of the city's taxes come from office space. So during this year of high vacancy, there was concern about a doom loop where empty office spaces would crash property tax revenue, forced budget cuts that ruin the whole city and everything falls apart and everything's horrible. Okay, but we did not get the doom loop, is what you're saying. No, everything's perfect.

No, I'm specifically talking about New York here. But across the country, the commercial real estate revival is a little more fragmented. But an important thing to note, this AI boom seems to be saving New York real estate for now. But AI is the boomiest boom there is. No one's sitting back and saying problem solved to commercial real estate because there's a chance the better AI gets, the less companies will actually need people. I thought you were going to say the bad scenario is that part of this AI spending boom is going to be a bubble. and then when a bunch of AI companies go bust,

then they're not going to need that office space anymore. And we're back to the doom loop. I know. It is certainly front of mind. Tech stocks dipped globally this week. Analysts are saying this could be the beginning of the end, the beginning of the bubble bursting. And the city comptroller said, quote,

I feel like we have a freight train coming down the tracks. In a good way? I mean, it's a win for now, but it's also kind of a hold-your-breath moment. Thank you for that really interesting indicator. Darren Woods. What do you have? Mine is quite related, which is all about why we're being asked to come back into the office all around the economy.

And my indicator of the week is 259. And that's how many CEOs were analyzed in a recent study on remote work. This study concluded that CEOs who appeared more narcissistic were more likely to resist remote working. Interesting. Okay, so this is like we're like psychoanalyzing CEOs now. Yeah. And we've talked about remote work on this show before, the last few indicators of the weeks over the last month we've talked about it. We're talking about the downsides of remote work, you know, things like worse mental health, hesitants to hire junior workers. But this paper just published in an organizational behavior journal shows another side of the debate, namely that mandates to come back to the office full time can be more about the boss's e-year. ego than about productivity.

Darien, what if the boss is just lonely? Yeah, won't someone think of the bosses? Lonely and maybe in need of someone to lord over. Maybe there's a boss loneliness epidemic. Have you ever thought about that? Nobody talks about it. Now, of course, for some jobs you need to work in person, a construction worker cannot build a house remotely. But for jobs where people can work remotely, the wider body of evidence does not show that always working in the office increases.

productivity or boosts the company's stock price. You know, when this is mandated, maybe some workers become more productive. But there's a huge hit to work on morale and the company loses staff. Okay, then how does all of this square with the problems in remote work that you identified, like the lack of mentorship and connection and that stuff? So I don't think the papers are in conflict. You know, researchers on remote worker coming to this semi-consensus, like an emerging agreement that hybrid is the best for many workplaces, ideally with coordinated days in the office,

maybe two or three days. So this study shows that full-time office mandates are on shaky foundations as maybe fully remote, on the other hand, all the time. Put me back in the office. I want to house every commercial office space. All right. Well, thank you, Cooper for joining us on Indicators of the week. Always fun to see you on this side of the camera. Thank you for having me with my now five fedoras. I gotta find a pork pie hat. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Quasi Lee. It was fact-checked by Corey Bridges and Emma Ferrara.

Kate and Cannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.