Grey OK on runway, not on job

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Author Anne Kreamer is grey and proud. (CP)

NEW YORK -- Jeanne Thompson began going grey at 23. She coloured 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 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 Gray 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-colourism."

In 1950, seven 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."

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 3, 2012 C1