NEW YORK – Jeanne Thompson began going grey
at 23. She colored her hair for years as she worked her way into management at
a large Boston-area financial services company, then gave up the dye for good
about a year ago.
The earth didn’t shake, and the 44-year-old
Thompson was promoted to top management the following year.
She is among a new type of grey panther, a
woman who aspires to do well and get ahead on the job while happily maintaining
a full head of grey.
“Women put pressure on themselves to
colour,” the Exeter, N.H., woman said. “It’s a bold statement to be
grey because it’s saying, ‘You know what? I did let my hair go, but I’m not
letting myself go.’ People take me more seriously now. I never apologize for
the grey hair.”
But not everyone finds it so easy.
Laws, of course, exist to ward off
discrimination in the workplace, yet legions of men and women have no interest
in letting their grey fly. Not now, when the struggling economy has produced a
stampede of hungry young job-seekers.
But grey heads have been popping up on
runways and red carpets, on models and young celebrities for months. There’s
Lady Gaga and Kelly Osbourne – via dye – and Hollywood royalty like Helen
Mirren, the Oscar-winning British actress.
Christine Lagarde, the International
Monetary Fund chief, is one of the most powerful women in the world, and she
keeps her hair grey. So does Essie Weingarten, founder and now creative
director of the nail polish company Essie Cosmetics.
For regular working women, it’s a trickier
issue.
“I don’t think a woman in the
workplace is going to follow that trend,” David Scher, a civil rights
attorney in Washington, said with a laugh. “I think women in the workplace
are highly pressured to look young. If I were an older working person, the last
thing I would do is go grey.”
Yes, he’s a dude, and at 44 he has
virtually no salt in his hair, but he wasn’t alone in issuing a warning against
workplace grey for women.
“While the Age Discrimination in
Employment Act of 1967 was created to protect employees 40 years of age and
older, some men and women may still encounter ageism in the workplace,”
said Stephanie Martinez Kluga, a manager for Insperity, a Houston-based company
that provides human resources services to small and medium-size businesses.
“The long-standing perception that men
with grey hair are experienced and women with grey hair are simply old may
still be an issue that affects employees in workplaces across the U.S.,”
she said.
Some of today’s new grey panthers also
offer strong words of caution about exactly how well those anti-discrimination
laws work.
Anne Kreamer is grey and proud, but she
didn’t unleash the colour until she left her day job to become self-employed.
She dedicates an entire chapter of her 2007 book “Going Grey” to
workplace issues.
“We only fool ourselves about how
young we look with our dyed hair,” said the Harvard-educated Kreamer, a
former Nickelodeon executive who helped launch the satirical magazine Spy
before writing the book exploring her journey to silver.
When it comes to grey on the job, Kreamer
said, context counts. The colour might be easier in academia over high-tech,
for instance, and in Minneapolis over Los Angeles. Job description and your
rung on the ladder might also be in play: chief financial officer versus a
lowlier, more creative and therefore more grey-tolerant position like assistant
talent agent, for example.
Kreamer dubbed the largely unspoken
phenomenon “hair-colorism.”
In 1950, 7 per cent of women dyed their
hair, she said. Today, it’s closer to 95 per cent or more, depending on
geographic location. In the ’60s, easy, affordable hair dye in a box hit store
shelves, changing the follicle landscape for good.
“When women were going to work, it was
like they could reinvent themselves and say, ‘I’m no house frau anymore.’ Hair
dye got kind of linked in there and we never looked back,” said Kreamer,
who went prematurely grey and colored for 25 years. “It’s still very
complicated.”
Sandra Rawline, 52, in Houston knows how
complicated it can be.
A trial is scheduled for June in her
federal lawsuit accusing her boss at Capital Title of Texas of ordering her to
dye her grey hair in 2009, when her office moved to a swankier part of town.
The suit accuses him of instructing her to wear “younger, fancier
suits” and lots of jewelry, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Rawline, an escrow officer and branch
manager, wouldn’t comment for this story. The newspaper said her superior
called her lawsuit preposterous.
The reason we know about Rawline and
Lagarde and Weingarten and Mirren and – let’s throw in NBCUniversal exec Lauren
Zalaznick – is that their grey strands stand out against a sea of, well, not
grey.
Weingarten, 62, began going grey at 18 and
said she colored for years. She gave it up about 20 years ago.
“People would say, ‘Are you crazy? You
have to colour your hair,”‘ she said. “I had my own business. I was
an entrepreneur. I could do whatever I wanted, but the truth is I know a lot of
women who are petrified to show grey hair because it means they’re maturing.”
The new “grey movement” doesn’t
keep tabs on membership, but blogs like Terri Holley’s Going Grey are
proliferating, along with pro-grey Facebook fan pages and Twitter feeds.
“Society has boxed in women on what’s
considered to be beautiful, and this defies how we’re supposed to look,”
Holley said. “People say, ‘I’m so glad I found you. I’m so glad we’re
having this conversation.”‘
Dana King, 53, started going grey in her
20s, began dyeing in her 30s and went to work for San Francisco’s KPIX in 1997,
rising to news anchor. In January 2010, she first approached her general
manager, a man whom she had known for a decade, about her giving up the dye.
“He didn’t like the idea at all and he
asked me not to do it,” King said. Soon after, she did it anyway, with the
comfort of a no-cut contract good to May 2013.
“It got down to the point where I was
dyeing it every two to three weeks. I just decided, ‘I’m not doing this
anymore.’ I felt like I had sold my soul and betrayed myself,” she said.
After sharing her hair story on-air, King
was deluged with emails from viewers, including many women who colored and some
who worried she had fallen ill. “The response was overwhelmingly
positive,” King said. “They said it was a relief for them, that they
could see someone that made it OK to be grey.”
King knows her road to grey wouldn’t have
gone so well had she been a TV news star elsewhere.
“I work in a youth-oriented industry
and I’m not an idiot,” she said. “This is not Miami. This is not Los
Angeles. I would have been fired had I worked in some other markets. I can’t
get a job anywhere else, I don’t think. I have no illusions about what I’ve
done and I’m good with that.”
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