If you're a woman over 40, what color is your hair? If you have women over 40 among your co-workers or employees, what color is their hair? Increasingly, the answer might be: natural gray. An increasing number of women have begun to question the longstanding presumption that to look professional, a woman must dye her gray hair.
Why is this happening now? As with so many things, it's partly due to the pandemic. Not only were most professionals suddenly working from home, but hair salons were forced to close. Millions of women who'd depended on regular hair appointments to keep their hair from reverting to its natural gray faced a choice: dye it at home or let the gray grow out. Many chose the latter option.
And then there are people like me who never dyed our hair in the first place, and never have. Why not? I started going gray in my early 30s, so having gray hair didn't make me think of myself as old. Once, when we were out having a drink, a colleague gave me a serious look and asked me how I had made the decision not to dye my hair. I wasn't quite sure how to answer. I never made a formal decision to not dye my hair--I just never did dye it. I'd heard of health dangers associated with hair dyes, but even more, I didn't like the idea of it. It didn't seem like me.
Can a gray-haired woman handle a demanding job?
Make no mistake, wearing your natural gray hair in the workplace can carry risks to your career. Cultural stereotypes tell us that a gray-haired man is seen as competent, experienced, and even sexy (think George Clooney), while a gray-haired woman is considered grandmotherly and inconsequential. That's, not how most professional women want to be perceived by their colleagues. Just think how many times you've heard the instruction to "make it so easy your grandmother could understand it." One insurance executive interviewed by the Wall Street Journal said she'd dyed her hair for years because of overhearing comments by her male colleagues that questioned whether a woman with gray hair had enough energy to take on a demanding account. When she finally decided she'd had enough and stopped dyeing her hair, colleagues asked if she was ill or depressed.
But attitudes may be changing. This summer, award-winning Canadian news anchor Lisa LaFlamme was fired with two years still to go on her contract by Bell Media, which owns CTV, the network where she had worked for 35 years. Beyond LaFlamme's statement that it was a "business decision" by the media company, neither party has given a public explanation as to the reason for her dismissal.
LaFlamme was another woman who let her hair go silver during the pandemic when she couldn't visit her hair colorist. She explained her decision on the air, saying that she'd been spraying her roots daily to meet television's exacting standards for appearance. Eventually she decided to just go gray. She called the decision "liberating."
LaFlamme and her newly gray hair were the subject of many news stories, and she was praised for her bravery by Canadian women. But not everyone was a fan. Michael Melling, a Bell Media executive who became head of CTV news was the one who fired LaFlamme. When The Globe and Mail reported that he'd questioned the decision to "approve" LaFlamme's gray hair color before firing her, there was widespread outcry. Support for LaFlamme poured in from all directions, and Wendy's Canada on Twitter changed its usual red-haired logo to gray hair in her honor. Melling is now on leave, although the company says that has nothing to do with LaFlamme's dismissal, and that LaFlamme's dismissal had nothing to do with her hair color. Whether or not either claim is true, the message is clear--a woman in the workplace or in the public eye who wears her hair gray could be putting her future success in peril.
Staying gray at my own risk?
So why am I still wearing my own gray hair? It helps that I've spent the last several decades working from home, and also working for myself. It also helps that so much of my work consists of what I'm doing right now--typing words on a screen. These words make up my public image much more than any actual image of me does. To most people, most of the time, I'm text on a screen or a page and what I actually look like doesn't much matter.
I've had gray hair for many, many years. But now, at 62, I'm decidedly older than most of the people I work with, and decidedly old for the generally youthful profession of journalism. Sometimes I wonder--would people instinctively think of me as more energetic, more vibrant, and perhaps more relevant if I started dyeing my hair? Would I, looking in the mirror, instinctively think of myself that way too?
Maybe. But that person in the mirror wouldn't look to me like me. In my new book, Career Self-Care, I explore the idea that the more we show up at work as our true selves, the better we can do our jobs, and ultimately, the more successful we'll be. For some of us, dyeing and/or straightening or curling our hair makes us feel more like ourselves, and that's totally fine. For me the opposite is true.
And so the real reason I'll never dye my hair is simply that I don't want to. It would take time that I'd rather spend on other things. Making sure I look like a younger version of myself would suck up energy that I'd much rather spend on my actual work. And any success I do have will belong to me, not some younger person I'm pretending to be.
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