NEW YORK — Jeanne Thompson began going gray at 23. She colored 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 gray panther, a woman who aspires to do well and get ahead on the job while happily maintaining a full head of gray.
“Women put pressure on themselves to color,” the Exeter, N.H., woman said. “It’s a bold statement to be gray 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 gray 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 gray fly. Not now, when the struggling economy has produced a stampede of hungry young job-seekers.
But gray 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 gray. 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.
“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 San Antonio-based company that provides human resources services to small and medium-size businesses.
“The long-standing perception that men with gray hair are experienced and women with gray 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 gray panthers also offer strong words of caution about exactly how well those anti-discrimination laws work.
Anne Kreamer is gray and proud, but she didn’t unleash the color 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 gray on the job, Kreamer said, context counts. The color 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 gray-tolerant position such as assistant talent agent, for example.
Kreamer dubbed the largely unspoken phenomenon “hair-colorism.”
In 1950, 7 percent of women dyed their hair, she said. Today, it’s closer to 95 percent or more, depending on geographic location.
“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 gray and colored for 25 years. “It’s still very complicated.”
Sandra Rawline, 52, in Houston knows how complicated it can be.
A trial is scheduled for June in her federal lawsuit accusing her boss at Capital Title of Texas of ordering her to dye her gray hair in 2009, when her office moved to a swankier part of town. The suit accuses him of instructing her to wear “younger, fancier suits” and lots of jewelry, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Rawline, an escrow officer and branch manager, wouldn’t comment for this story. The newspaper said her superior called her lawsuit preposterous.
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