#off topic tuesday

“Madison, who works a customer service job at an airport spa, has an employee handbook that says “makeup should be well maintained” and “hands and nails must be well manicured.” She says the few men she works with just ignore these guidelines “because they’re meant for women but [it] doesn’t explicitly say that.” Her wages ($13.25 per hour + 15% retail commission) do not include additional pay to purchase manicures or makeup. During her interview, her now-boss commented on how nice her makeup looked and how well her shoes matched her purse—comments that make her feel like she needs to keep up that kind of appearance even though she already has the job. 

It’s well known that a persistent wage gap exists for women workers in the United States, a gap that becomes even wider when race, industry, age and geography are taken into account. But less frequently discussed is the often silent expectation around appearance imposed on women workers, which has its own financial costs—known as the “grooming gap.” The grooming gap refers to the set of social norms regarding grooming and appearance for women, including the time women workers must spend to conform to these norms and the material consequences it has on their lives. 

We’ve all heard the common advice to “look the part” at work. For men, that can often just mean business casual clothing and a short haircut. For women, it can mean hours spent each week on makeup, hair styling and curating an outfit that’s both attractive and professional. 

The rules are usually unspoken; even when employers do not explicitly require workers to wear makeup, for example, women workers often feel required to wear it anyway. 

They’re not wrong: Sociologists Jaclyn Wong and Andrew Penner found that physically attractive workers have higher incomes than average-looking workers, but that this relationship is eliminated when controlling for grooming in women. In other words, if you purchase the right clothes, makeup and haircut, higher wages are more within reach. It’s true that men need to abide by certain grooming rules, too, but they are less complex, less expensive and less time consuming. Men’s haircuts, for example, often cost much less than women’s haircuts—regardless of hair length. The grooming gap essentially constitutes a pay cut catch-22: If women don’t conform, they are paid less; if they do conform, they’re expected to use those higher wages on beauty products and grooming regimens. 

Grooming costs for women can be extremely expensive; the global beauty industry, valued at $532 billion worldwide, directs aggressive advertising toward women to convince them they need to purchase a whole host of products to have a chance at being beautiful, well-liked or successful. The industry relies on maintaining impossible expectations around women’s looks so it can continue to rake in enormous profits. One 2017 study found the average woman puts $8 worth of product on her face each day; another found the average woman spends up to $225,000 on skincare and makeup during her lifetime. And then there’s the “pink tax”: Studies confirm that, 42% of the time, products marketed to women are more expensive than comparable products targeted to men. 

The grooming gap also results in a loss of free time: 55 minutes each day for the average woman, the equivalent of two full weeks each year. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFACWA), says that, in her industry—a workforce that is 79.3% women—the expectation around appearance literally “interrupts your sleep”: Flight attendants get minimal rest between flights, and that rest time is further shrunk because they are expected to appear “perfectly coifed” before their next flight. Nelson says that all of her grooming tasks took 30–40 minutes each day (more than two hours in a five-day work week). Madison agrees: it takes her 45 minutes to do her makeup and style her hair before her 7 a.m. shift—and she wakes up at 5 a.m. to get it all done. Prior to this job, Madison says she worked at the beauty department at Target, where she spent $200 on products every other week. 

Restaurant and hospitality workers are perhaps hardest hit by the grooming gap, as they rely on tips to survive. When I was a barista in 2010–2011, the only official dress code rule was to wear closed-toed shoes, for safety. Still, I knew I had to show up looking pretty to pay the rent; I made less than $10 an hour and I needed the tips.

Katie, 36, a veteran bartender and server in Fort Smith, Ark., says at her current job, it’s “understood” she should wear makeup. At a previous restaurant, a manager even told her and her coworkers they would “make better tips if [they] wore makeup.”

“Based on my own appearance—weight fluctuations, makeup versus no makeup, jewelry versus no jewelry—there’s a definite difference,” Katie says. She adds that she was passed over for the most lucrative bartending shifts at her previous job after overhearing her managers say they wanted “cuter girls” to bartend instead.

Multi-billion dollar industries also market fad diets and anti-aging products to women. Both Katie and Jeeva, 24, a bartender and member of UNITE HERE, the union representing hospitality, hotel and airport workers, worry about aging. “As you get older, as a female bartender, your tips can go down,” Jeeva says. Katie says she “hope[s] to leave [the service industry] in the next 10 years, before I get too ugly.”

The grooming gap’s effects are compounded for women of color. According to Restaurant Opportunity Center, restaurant owners look for workers who are “clean-cut, [have] good hygiene or a professional appearance, all potential code words for race.” For instance, Black women spent $473 million on relaxers, weaves and other hair care in 2017, in part because of racist ideas that natural Black hair is not professional or attractive. Black workers annually spend nine times more on hair and beauty products than other workers. 

For transgender women, too, there can be an added layer of work, stress and self-consciousness. Autumn, who transitioned while at her current publishing job in Washington, D.C., says she quickly realized how much time and energy it takes to perform femininity for work. She used to spend 20 minutes to get ready in the morning, but now takes at least 45 minutes. Autumn adds, “I have to do things that cis women don’t have to… [but] it’s gotten easier with time and practice,” like tucking and dealing with facial hair. Because she presents extremely femme, Autumn says she hasn’t dealt with enforcement around her appearance, but other women workers around the country have been disciplined and even fired for appearing insufficiently feminine. Women workers have sued—and won—over gender discrimination that manifests as attractiveness discrimination.

Nat, a trans woman who works at a union in the Washington, D.C., area, says, “I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be a woman if I liked masculine things. It delayed any kind of self-reflection” about gender and identity “for such a long time.”

Here's what I've been reading during the hiatus! (romcom edition!)

Real signs from the Missouri State Fair.

Years ago I used to work shifts at the Missouri State Fair. I typically enjoyed it, and I had the chance to see all types of very interesting things. Here is a sampling of my favorite signs. Enjoy.

#off topic tuesday

If I had a bingo card my line would be Snickers, Oreos, cheesecake, pickles and tomatoes. (I'm not counting the ice-cream because I've only had it at sit-down establishments.)

Deep_friend_coke. GOOD LORD.

A problem I never considered....

*off topic Tuesday*

I found an animation program so I made this!

I’m gonna keep doing Trolls stuff with it but I thought my eyes looked cool :)

Text from the article:

"Would you paint your house a luscious purple? Would you drive a pink car? Would you dress head-to-toe in sunshine yellow? If you said yes, you’re in the minority.

That’s not because gray houses, white cars, and black suits are inherently appealing. Color norms and preferences have a deep history, and according to the art theorist David Batchelor, “In the West…color has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished, and degraded.” This marginalization of color has led to collective chromophobia, or fear of color.

Chromophobia has a complex past spanning millennia, but the age of Western colonial expansion put it on steroids. Over the course of the last few centuries, color became a powerful visual indicator of a person’s perceived social, intellectual, and racial status.

There's nothing neutral about neutrals. Read on to learn why we all need a little more color in our lives.

Chromophobia Is a Form of Control

Your initial objection to the concept of chromophobia might be that it’s simple to look around and see plenty of color: green trees, blue sky, vibrant flowers. None of these inspire fear.

But consider this: In the things that we make or buy, color tends to be reined in. (Note, when I say “we,” I’m speaking of a dominant American and European approach to color. Many cultures embrace color, as I’ll explore below.)

For example, it’s fashionable to wear a “pop” of color, but unacceptable for your average American man to show up to a business meeting in a hot pink suit. Large doses of vivid color can seem like an assault on the senses. It’s too “loud.” Too “tacky.”

Chromophobic societies don’t do away with color altogether. They control it.

Just think of all the rules we have for colors: pastels are for the spring; muddy green clashes with bold red; saturated orange is fine for a front door, but your homeowners’ association would shudder if the whole house were orange. All of us know what primary colors are and that red is “warm.”

These rules have become second nature to us, but they aren’t timeless. The concept of primary colors only emerged in the eighteenth century, and the idea of warm colors developed in the nineteenth. In other words, these rules are the product of a particular historical era. And in that era, people were highly concerned about the “anarchy” of color.

There are many reasons color was perceived as socially threatening (too many to cover here), but one major driver was colonial expansion.

The Empire of Color

As European countries extended their trade networks, some of the most precious commodities they found were pigments. Elites reveled in pricey, cochineal-dyed garments and lapis lazuli-dappled paintings.

But as expensive colors grew cheaper and more widely accessible, a lot of powerful businessmen put up resistance. For example, during the seventeenth century, the British East India Company started importing cheap, brightly colored cotton from India. The wool and silk guilds were afraid of losing their stronghold on the market, so they asked lawmakers for protection. New regulations stipulated that the colorful cottons couldn't be sold in England; they had to be immediately exported to other markets.

So, Europeans took their colorful wares to places that would treasure them. West Africans had been using cloth as currency for centuries, and early European merchants learned they could trade colorful cloth for slaves. Europeans took colorful textiles and pigments from places like India, Southeast Asia, and Mexico and traded them for African slaves, many of whom were put to work producing more dyestuffs, like indigo.

Between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, Western European countries aggressively expanded their claims on foreign lands. Previously, the goal had been to enslave Africans, but the new goal was to bring them into the consumer fold. European empires extracted resources (many of which were color-related), then traded them back to their colonial subjects for profit.

By tying chromophilic (color-loving) cultures together, Europeans built a highly lucrative and utterly exploitative economic system.

Superiority and Savagery

Meanwhile, back in Europe, people began associating bright colors with Other-ness, degeneracy, and inferiority. The German writer Goethe famously stated, “Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, and children have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness.”

That prejudice was still alive a century later. In 1912, the advertising executive Frank Parsons asserted, “Many Latin races, still somewhat primitive in taste, need [red] to meet their temperaments.” And in 1921, color psychologists like J.C.F. Grumbine still stressed, “The primary colors of red, yellow, and blue appealed to the elemental and simple minds of the savage.”

Some authors used pseudoscientific justification to support these claims. They argued that “savage” people needed stronger stimulation because they had duller senses. (This justification was also used by slaveowners who claimed slaves were “insensitive” to pain.)

Increasingly, so-called “good taste” became linked to “quiet colors,” or what we’d call neutrals today. For example, gentlemen only wore dark suits, and demure women never wore red. Over time, neutrals became the stamp of social and moral superiority, while too much saturation threatened a slippery slope back to “savagery.”

In short, color preferences became a weapon, a way to instantly label a person as “uncivilized” or inferior.

Let Go

The very idea of “good taste” draws on a deep well of cultural assumptions of what's “normal” or “refined.” There is no such thing as an inherently professional, respectable color. Those are categories that we’ve created, and frankly, they come with a lot of economic, social, and historical baggage.

It’s time to revisit those assumptions and loosen the reins. I’m not suggesting that everyone has to parade around in neon or toss neutrals out the window. But personally, I’d love to see a world that readily embraces color instead of restraining it. I’d like for us to overcome our collective chromophobia and say, “It’s okay to step out of my comfort zone! I’m going to have fun. Or, at least, I’m not going to judge others who do.” After all, what are we so afraid of?

For today's Off Topic Tuesday: debunking the myth that your brain allegedly doesn't fully develop until you're 25, and then just suddenly stops developing at that age. The truth is far more complicated than that.

I personally really hate this myth, because I've seen it used to excuse some pretty abhorrent behavior.

For example, I'm in a Facebook group for the neighborhood of Reykjavík I live in. A Polish immigrant recently made a post about how Icelandic teenagers have been drawing swastikas on his car at night. He made this post to inform parents in the area, and asking parents to speak to their children about why this behavior wasn't acceptable.

Except, predictably, the comment section was full of Icelandic parents justifying this behavior by pulling out the "your brain doesn't fully finish developing until you are 25" myth, saying things like "but they're just children still, I'm sure when they're 25 and their brain finishes developing they'll feel a lot of shame over this behavior". Except, I knew better when I was a teen than to draw a swastika on an immigrant's car, and I'm bloody well sure that these kids are capable of knowing better too.

A few weeks ago I had a session with my therapist where I talked about how damaging it was for me to be harassed and assaulted by my peers when I was in my teens and early 20's. My therapist said something along the lines of "well, you were surrounded by people without a fully developed prefrontal cortex, and unfortunately this is how people without a fully developed prefrontal cortex can be. I'm sure when they turned 25 and their brain fully developed they felt really bad about what they did to you." Except, when I was that age, I knew it was wrong to harass and assault other people, I'm pretty sure the people who had been harassing and assaulting me were also capable of knowing better even at that age.

There are also major double standards in who can have their abhorrent behavior dismissed by "not having a fully developed prefrontal cortex."

There have been several stabbings in Iceland over the past few years, many of them carried out by Icelandic teenagers. There is a typical pattern that unfolds when the news stories break. When the story first breaks something like "man in a parking lot stabbed by teenagers" the common rhetoric you see is "See! This is what happens when you let all of these foreigners into the country! Iceland has been destroyed by all of these immigrants! We need to close the boarders and kick out all of the immigrants now or else this will just keep happening!"

But then, when the news story unfolds that the teenagers who did the stabbing were actually Icelandic, the tone does a total 180. "But they are just children 🥺 how could they possibly know any better at the tender young age of 18 🥺 their brains aren't even fully developed it's not their fault 🥺" when the same people were calling for kicking out all the foreigners when they assumed the stabbing had been done by a teenager of foreign origin.

That's why I personally hate this myth of "your brain doesn't fully develop until you're 25". It's not just that it's used to excuse abhorrent behavior in people under 25, it's the fact that it's used selectively towards privileged young people to excuse behavior that would not be excused in someone of the same age, but less privileged.

Yes, of course young people are going to make mistakes, and do things they may look on with regret when they're older. However, there is a limit, and I actually think it's rather degrading to young people to pretend they're really so mindless that they're not capable of knowing any better. There are some very brilliant young people who have changed the world, and acting like everyone under 25 is really so mindless and animalistic that they really can't tell it's wrong to harass or stab someone is demeaning and degrading to the very brilliant young people out there.