By
Britni de la Cretaz,
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The night before what was indisputably going to be
the biggest day of my professional career, I should have been up late
prepping interview questions, packing extra batteries for my recorder,
or even catching a few extra hours of sleep. Instead, I was staring at
the thick, black hair on my legs in frustration.
As a freelancer who mostly works from home, I don't
often have to worry about the tendrils of hair that grow, visibly, down
my legs. But I was going to be reporting from a major league baseball
stadium in 95-degree heat, walking onto the field and into the
clubhouse. As a woman relatively new to the male-dominated field of
baseball writing, my goal was to be as inconspicuous and
professional-looking as possible, and I worried that my visible leg hair
would have the opposite effect.
As I looked
through my closet at my maxi dresses (too casual), jeans (also too
casual), and tights (out of place in the heat), my stress turned to
anger. As I crowdsourced ideas and solutions and posted photos of myself
in various professional outfits on Facebook, I wondered how many men
had lost hours of prep time for their job worrying about their body
hair. I wondered how many men had to balance their desire to look
professional with the autonomy to allow their body to do what it
naturally does — grow hair. I was enraged that, hours before a
career-defining interview, I was worried about leg hair.
I was enraged that, hours before a career-defining interview, I was worried about leg hair.
[post_ads]For many women and femmes, figuring out how to
navigate body hair in professional settings is something they think
about quite a bit. Because despite the fact that the act of having hair
on our legs or under our arms is something we might do for a myriad of
reasons — personally, shaving is uncomfortable and causes too much
irritation — body hair on women is often seen as a radical political
statement.
Harnaam Kaur, a
body-confidence/anti-bullying advocate, explains that her body hair —
she has thick facial hair as a result of PCOS — often kept her from
getting work. "Because of the image that I had, a lot of employers
judged me at face value and didn't take into account my abilities and
experiences that I had to impact their workplace," she tells ELLE.com.
"When I was able to find a job, I was horribly discriminated against and
bullied." As a result, Kaur says she carved out her own career, using
her challenges to help her create positive change for others.
Emily
Lemiska's disability makes shaving her legs a painful and difficult
task. Lemiska, 30, says that her job in nonprofit advocacy means she's
often speaking at large conferences or meeting with state legislators,
and she feels pressure to shave her leg hair before those events. "I
hate the idea that my leg hair might distract someone from my message,"
she says. "I also spend a lot of time already feeling abnormal and
different due to my physical challenges. I don't want another reason to
stand out."
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When the women's liberation
movement took root in the 1970s, underarm hair, in particular, became
associated with a certain kind feminism. The body hair often usurped
everything else about a person and, even today, sporting body hair is
often interpreted as "making a statement," as demonstrated by the many
sensationalist and negative reactions when Julia Roberts appeared with
underarm hair on the red carpet in 1999, or Mo'Nique walked the carpet
with hair on her legs in 2010.
These preconceived notions
of women with body hair as "unkempt," "messy," or "gross" carry over
into professional settings. In the job market, where women already face
discrimination when it comes to hiring and promotions, and where "attractiveness" can affect a woman's ability to get hired and earn money,
conforming to traditional Western standards of beauty, whether it's
wearing makeup and dresses, or removing body hair, may be a necessary
evil. This necessity can feel compounded for women of color, who face
even larger barriers when it comes to hiring practices. White, cisgender
women like me have more freedom when it comes to eschewing norms around
aesthetics and beauty; while I am marginalized as a woman in the
male-dominated field of sports writing, I still have privilege in
relation to black and brown women and femmes.
[post_ads]"I'm hyperaware of the fat antagonism, ableism,
racism (colorism in particular), and sexism (among other things) that
permeates [creative] industries, whether indie or Hollywood," says
Denarii Grace, a 30-year-old writer, singer-songwriter, and poet.
"Someone with just one of my marginalizations often has a hard go of it,
so the prospect of trying to live in my purpose doing this while also
having food to eat and being able to afford my own place is, quite
frankly, daunting." Grace, who has visible hair on her chin as a result
of PCOS, says she often wonders how much she will be expected to change
in order to succeed.
Pooja Makhijani, 39, tells
ELLE.com that seeing "an open embrace of not removing hair [on social
media]" is conflicting for her due to the way she was socialized to
think about body hair. "Growing up as a South Asian-American woman, my
body hair was mocked. I have dark hair on my skin and as a young child, I
spent countless hours with my South Asian girlfriends discussing body
hair removal methods; it's how we spent sleepovers," she says. Makhijani
says she wears long pants and long sleeves in professional work
settings, even though she waxes her arms, because she still worries how
she will be perceived if she has visible body hair. It becomes hard to
concentrate on the task at hand if you're preoccupied with whether
people are looking at your body and judging you.
For
trans women, body hair can be a complicated topic. Katelyn Burns, 35,
says her body hair was a major source of feelings of gender dysphoria
for her but her decision to shave her body hair goes even further. "For
any trans woman, how we tailor our appearance is absolutely vital to our
safety," says Burns, who worked in the banking industry until recently.
"Whether we like it or not, 'passing' as cis women gives us safety,"
she says, in both a physical sense but also potentially in the
workplace. At least 1 in 5 transgender people surveyed by the Human Rights Campaign report experiencing employment discrimination.
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Some women and femmes choose to remove their body
hair, whether it's because they prefer their body that way or because
they see it as a necessary component of navigating a patriarchal world.
Others choose to wear pants year-round, or have a collection of tights
or stockings for the purpose of hiding their body hair. But regardless
of the choice we make, the physical and emotional labor that goes into
making it can be exhausting — "cumbersome, time-consuming, expensive …
and wholly unfair," is how Lemiska describes it. "I consider how much I
will be expected to change, the way folks will talk about me," says
Grace, the singer-songwriter and poet. "There are times when I feel like
I don't even stand a chance. [Like,] why bother?"
Thanks to a 10:30 p.m. Target run, I was able to
procure slacks that fit and my leg hair remained intact — but at what
cost? I pulled off the interview and wrote a well-received profile, but I
wonder if I would have asked better questions or been able to read up
more on the subject if I hadn't spent literal hours figuring out whether
to bust out the razor. How much better at my job would I be if I didn't
have to add "figuring out what to do about my body hair" to the list of
things required for me to do it? It's a question I'll likely never have
an answer to, and just one more example of the small, unseen factors
that hold women back in the workplace.
