Do you think of gray hair as a liability at work? Do you color your hair to feel more competitive, or as the Just For Men advertising campaign puts it, "to stay in the game?"
If so you’re not alone. And in fact, if you’re female, you have even more reason to worry that if you do reveal your naturally gray hair there will be dire consequences.
Here’s the lead from a recent piece by David Masello in the Boston Globe: "When one of my favorite colleagues was fired, I asked her why, after 25 years with the magazine, she had been 'let go.' Even as I asked the question, I knew it was a rhetorical one, but I was hoping that, maybe, she had a better, fairer reason. Betty-Jean put both hands in her hair and held out big tufts of her pretty curls. 'This is why,' she said, 'Because my hair is gray. Or, rather, in my case, white. And I refuse to color it. That’s why they don’t want me around.'"
In a poll that accompanied a piece I recently wrote for Time, an overwhelming 67 percent of people believe that gray hair is a disadvantage in the workplace.
A friend of mine, a 64-year-old executive at a cosmetics company, told me she prefers to have her colleagues think she’s in her 50s, and believes the artificial color allows her to sustain that illusion. And while it makes some sort of sense that gray hair might be a no-go in the beauty industry, a 52-year-old educational consultant in Denver told me she "was very conscious of wanting to come across as 'not old' in a recent round of interviews. All the other 50ish women with whom I come in contact dye their hair."
As Masello closed his piece in the Globe: "I really do believe that some day we will look back at this time and marvel at the unfairness of the ageism we now so overtly practice. I believe it will come to seem as outrageous as Jim Crow laws or the denial of the vote to women or the medieval practice of drilling into skulls to relieve headaches. I just hope this new enlightenment takes effect in the next several years, in time to save my job and my career."
This is serious business. Now that our average life expectancy is practically 80, and retirement ages are creeping higher, it’s imperative that many more of us work years, if not decades, past 65 in order to maintain a reasonable standard of living.
If looking our age prevents us from keeping or getting good jobs, how will society cope? We need more role models in public life illustrating that gray hair does not imply old fogeyism or tiredness.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Anne Kreamer is the author of "Going Gray."
To learn more visit her website, AnneKreamer.com
