That’s not “jamming”, that’s correctifying.
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That sounds like a big part of the problem, some of the “unprofessional” hairstyles look perfectly professional to me-- there’s a female doctor ferchrissakes!
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Well, this explains some things. I was reading about a recent study that was done with equal groups of black and white job applicants with equal resumés - the white candidates were twice as likely to be offered the job. (This was true even when they had just spent 18 months in jail and the black candidates had clean criminal records.) The job offerers obviously had no choice - the black candidates just didn’t have a “professional appearance”! /sarcasm
The algorithm is just associating pictures with the text that surrounds them. In this case, the text involves discussions of how black hair is, in schools and workplaces, often labeled “unprofessional” unless it’s been chemically straightened. So the society is racist and the algorithm naively reflecting back bits of a discussion about that, but without context. Without awareness of that context, the results are simply reinforcing that societal racism.
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But… if it’s all logical, then… there’s no reason for outrage!
Won’t somebody please think of the outrage!
Maybe the sort of, backstory racism here is that black women have to worry a lot more than others do about what “professional” hair looks like. And so, they Google it a lot more. And, a lot more pieces get written online about it than do pieces about “professional hairstyles” for women who aren’t black.
A lot of common black hairstyles get deemed “unprofessional” in largely white workplaces, just because they’re “black” hairstyles. And a lot of black women know that.
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Actually, @popobawa4u, I think I’m missing a couple of “parent words” there…
- The root Latin word (fatērī) means “to confess”
- The pro- prefix means “openly” - so “profess” means “to confess openly,” where it has come to mean “to declare openly one’s skill”
- the -ion suffix, which denotes activity, changes the word from a verb to an noun, so "profession is “the activity in which one has declared one’s skill.”
- the -al suffix, which denotes generalization, changes the word from a noun to an adjective, so “professional”: “having the form or character of an activity in which one has declared one’s skill.”
Now, we could leave it there, and say that one who wishes to be known for one’s skill would wish to present oneself to one’s prospective clients in a manner that indicates that one is careful and detail-oriented. However, here’s the couple of steps that I think I previously missed: - the -ism suffix denotes adherence and changes it back to a noun, so “professionalism” is “adherence to the form or character of an activity in which one has declared one’s skill” - once you have the concept of “adherence,” you must have something to adhere to: you need to have defined rules, and these rules generally include rules about appearance.
- Finally, “professionalism” does not have its own adjective form (I suppose you could use “professionalismic” or “professionalistic” but no one does, probably because they’re too awkward to use for such a subtle distinction), so it reverts back to “professional” - therefore, “having the form and character of a profession” and “adhering to the rules defining the form and character of a profession” are, in fact, the same word. Maybe they shouldn’t be, but, sadly. that’s how the English language works.
So, that’s how one’s hair (“professional” as in “professionalism”) can have something to do with “professing” - “declaring openly [a skill].”
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GET OUT OF MY BATHROOM RIGHT NOW YOU PEEPING TOM!
Also the Daily Show talked about this with the army’s new rules for black hair a while back. Same same.
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It’s hard to say what is true about The Algorithm, but it definitely includes all sorts of things beyond this, such as tracking, social sharing, traffic, design, etc.
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“weird hairstyle for work” is mostly caucasian
"bad hairstyle for work" is mixed, but dominated by caucasians
"inappropriate hairstyle for work" has a strong black showing at the beginning, but then devolves into caucasianfest
It seems to be a mixed bag, really. Besides, the two black hairdo links I’ve clicked were actually examples of a professional do, with a warning that one should make sure not to have something unprofessional on his or her head.
I’m not sure how racist that is, but I guess it wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t an issue.
Giant frizzballs ftw. I can usually tame my mane, but it ain’t easy. And the worst is when it is freshly washed. I look Rick from Rick and Morty.
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I am just jealous of them having hair to not care what is professional or not. I figure is it clean, kept up, not a crazy punk spiky mohawk thing then it is fine for just about any setting. I am honestly happy to see that colors like bright pink and purple are acceptable for the most part now. But for me the male pattern baldness is at the point I just get short buzz cut anymore. Even then my hair is so fine I get bed head… seriously.
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Google image search for “racism” brings up anti-racist slogans and stock photography. . . googling “anti-racism” also brings up anti-racist slogans and stock photos. . . .
I think the algorithm is beside the point anyway. It’s fair to take google’s algorithm as a stand-in for the subconsciousness of the internet in this instance. These results are weighted by all kinds of different factors, but all that just aggregates up and we see these professional/unprofessional haircuts come out of the summed biases. If google reliably gets me “star trek chekov with two guns”, and “colouring pages unicorns”, then I expect it to reliably tell me what it thinks I will think the internet thinks a professional haircut looks like.
The important thing is black womens’ experiences of being seen as unprofessional because they have the kind of hair that black women have. These search results certainly give us a clue of what to expect if we poll black women on this issue.
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Just to add, when I first read the headline (even before seeing the google results, or the comments), I assumed that the unprofessional/professional haircuts search would actually be for haircuts done at home or haircuts done at a salon. The comments seem to assume it means acceptable for work hair styles.
Given the opaque nature of Google’s search structure, the racial difference of the results, and the different meanings the search could actually imply, It’s difficult to actually figure out exactly what this means. It is interesting though.
Also it’s kind of funny that the thread quickly got to comments about my own obviously-unprofessional hair–which has always gotten me positive attention, including in professional environments.
It’s almost as if there were something else about me that allowed me to make (or avoid) choices that others labor under.
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It wasn’t related to race but this reminds me of when I was in 7th grade and a kid was suspended for getting a mohawk. To this day I’m not sure what that was supposed to teach him. “We’re throwing you out of school. That’ll teach you to cut your hair like that.”
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Is there really any reason we can’t define a professional-looking hairstyle as “clean” and leave it at that? It seems like hygiene should be the only factor here. I’ve had blue or purple hair before and gotten nothing but compliments, and a friend of mine has had hair in various shades of pink, blue and purple for years and worked at various professional jobs with not a single complaint. The number of people who actually care about a person’s hair style or color is very small, not nearly enough to justify the ubiquity of these policies, and I’m frankly 100% in favor of making a person’s life difficult if they’re oh-so-offended by cornrows, afros, mohawks, pigtails, men with long hair, unnatural hair colors, etc. As long as it’s not shaved into racial slurs or something, it’s none of anyone else’s business.
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In other words, the algorithm isn’t biased (probably), but it manages to reflect bias in the larger society; black women face this problem, so the algorithm directs us to images culled from their online discussions about it.
That’s reasonable. I think the knee-jerk reaction is for people to assume some kind of bias in the algorithm. As someone else pointed out, “professional hairstyle” could also mean “as done by a professional hairstylist”, so there are additional levels of meaning in the google results, and we read in a larger meaning, perhaps unfairly.
(Interestingly: “haircut” instead of “hairstyle” brings up images of mostly white women, whereas “professional haircut” brings up images of white men, and “unprofessional haircut” brings up a pretty wide mix of races, genders and styles.)
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I always assumed that our robot overlords would despise all humans equally…
But even this dashing scoundrel favours (a) white male
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Continuing the discussion from Misandry for fun and profit (topical animated .gif bank):
Ha! I got to link to my own post on BBS! LOL
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