(NewsNation) – A recent study shows women who are on GLP-1s weren’t just losing weight but also increasing their chances of getting hired at a new job.

Rebecca Diamond, an economics professor at Harvard University, told Business Insider that she conducted the study after talking to a friend who commented on being treated better after losing weight with GLP-1s, short for glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists.

The research paper showed that the employment rate for women who weren’t working before taking the weight loss drugs rose 27% after about a year and a half of taking GLP-1 drugs.

“Mass pharmacological weight loss is not only a health shock. It is also a shock to the social and labor-market valuation of body weight,” Diamond wrote. “What does not change for women is equally informative. The arrangements that do not respond are the ones already in place, where any first impression occurred long ago and where weight is one characteristic embedded in a much richer stock of information.”

For her research, Diamond analyzed the University of Southern California’s Understanding America Study, an online panel of more than 10,000 U.S. adults, to determine the employment and relationship status of women who started using GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, compared with women who were interested in taking GLP-1s but hadn’t yet started.

She then got a control group from the USC panel of women who expressed interest in obesity drugs but hadn’t taken them yet. Not only were unemployed women who started on a GLP-1 more likely to land a job, but single women taking a GLP-1 were also more likely, by equal measure, to get married or start living with a partner over the time period surveyed.

The only thing that did not change, however, was their self-reported life satisfaction.

“Despite life looking better on paper, it doesn’t seem like there’s some subjective wellbeing improvement that is going along with it,” Diamond said.

The only thing Diamond could not determine from her study was whether women who started taking weight loss drugs eventually earned more, as there wasn’t enough data in the panel over the time that was studied.

GLP-1s have soared in popularity in recent years, and they’ve spurred dramatic weight loss in many patients. But their cost — sometimes hundreds of dollars a month for higher doses — has been a barrier.

This week, the federal government began offering a selection of brand-name medications to certain Medicare and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries for $50 a month through a new trial called Medicare GLP-1 Bridge.

The temporary program runs until the end of 2027.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.