Associated Incidents
The subject of women's hair choices in the workplace has long been a fraught topic, and it's infinitely more so for women of color who embrace their natural hair texture. It's the perfect storm of sexism and racism, and it's just the worst. While it's not untrue to say that we've made strides when it comes to making natural hair better understood and celebrated on a mainstream level, there's still a depressingly long way to go. The latest public display of the extent to which this disturbing sexism-racism hybrid is still at play? The shocking, racially charged results that pop up when you do a Google image search for "unprofessional hairstyles for work."
The issue first caught people's attention when Twitter user @BonKamona tweeted a side-by-side comparison of the results of searches for "professional" and "unprofessional" hairstyles for work.
The divide is pretty startling: The images that the algorithm deemed "professional" were overwhelmingly white and straight-haired, while the "unprofessional" ones showed almost exclusively models of color with curly hair (and Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games trilogy, which we have to agree probably isn't an ideal work look).
Another user, @MalumDube, pointed out that one hairstyle seems to magically transform from "professional" to "unprofessional" when transferred from Rachael McAdams to a black model:
Exactly how Google is coming up with these seriously problematic results remains unclear. Many have pointed out that the images are being pulled from posts discussing how natural hair texture is not unprofessional or analyzing how corporate cultures perceive styles like Afros and dreadlocks, which may be confusing the search algorithm into associating those words and images with the term "unprofessional" even when the articles and Pinterest boards they're pulled from are in support of those styles in work settings. The simple fact that enough of these articles exist to potentially trip up a major search engine like Google, though, points to the continuing problems women with natural hair face in the workplace.
Whether the Google image search algorithm is, indeed, the technological victim of being unable to parse complex content or whether, like the recent flameout of Microsoft's artificial-intelligence chatbot Tay, it's simply learning bad lessons from the darker corners of the Internet, it's clear that these image search results are an issue for women of all colors.