World Goth Day 2017, or, The Day I Was Told Not To Wear Black Lipstick to Work Anymore
Story time! I recently started working in Guest Services for an EconoLodge hotel, which is on the low end of the various Choice family of hotels. It's a fairly laid-back job, for being in the hospitality industry, largely by merit of it being affordable rather than posh lodging. I was originally hired on to be a house person (think housekeeping's burlier support team), with the intention of having me cross-trained for front desk soon after, in order to provide support to two under-staffed departments with differing scheduling needs. In fact, I was to be their first-ever house woman. How exciting! This was what I wore to my first interview:
Sadly, I failed to take any pictures on orientation day, but I remember wearing a pink high-collared lace shirt tucked into flared jeans with heels, and I wore one of my faux septum piercings and fairly bold makeup, with the faded part of my hair pulled back to reveal the much brighter purple underneath, much like I wore it the next day in this picture:
No mention was ever made regarding my appearance that wasn't a compliment, and I made it a point to confirm a borderline obnoxious number of times that my hair color was NOT going to be a problem, and mentioned at least once that I was planning on redyeing it the same color as soon as I could, which would make it brighter but more uniform. I also let them know that I had no problem not wearing the nose jewelry since I knew that facial piercings were not allowed (and mine isn't real anyway). I was reassured that this would not be a problem.
Fast forward to a few weeks later (which would be last week), I had finally gotten my locks redyed...
...and I was getting to be actually helpful to the other house men, doing the more physical work like taking out the building trash, resupplying the housekeeping storage rooms, and doing general gofer work that sometimes involved some fairly intense physical labor, like the day they had us move eighty metal chairs of decent heft across the property:
We were all exhausted after this, and I had to carry fewer chairs at a time than the guys because I'm fairly out of shape and also a small lady, but I felt empowered to have done my part in such a large job.
The next day, we were tasked with moving a cooler full of drinks for some insurance fair in one of the suites, and being the go-getting idiot that I am, I volunteered to go along instead of letting the two men deal with it on their own, thinking that this cooler was going to be of a reasonable size.
This thing was big enough to be my coffin, and full of ice and drinks. I couldn't lift on end of it, and in the end, two burly kitchen guys loaded it into our cart trailer for us. We got as close to the entrance of the suite as we could, and my coworker was able to rotate it one end at a time to get it halfway to the door by himself, and then one of the front desk girls stepped up and impressed the hell out of me by helping him carry it into the room herself. Girl, where you hiding that muscle, daaaannnng!
As my kind of luck would have it, the owner happened to be watching, and it was at this moment that he realized which department I was in, and he decided he didn't want to have a woman in the house person department, because of the hard work it entailed. Never mind that at least one of the other house men couldn't have lifted the damned thing, either. So I was moved to the front desk exclusively, and the house men were understaffed and overworked once more.
Strike one. I joked that I'd found out that day what happens when you break a glass ceiling: maintenance comes and repairs it, and you have to fill out an incident report for your near miss because you could have hurt yourself.
Now, it took me a few days, but I'd come to forgive the boss man for making that decision, because, besides the fact that there was nothing I was going to be able to do about it, at least his sexism was only intended to protect me (or at least to protect the company from a frivolous lawsuit later if I happened to injure myself or something). More like misguided chivalry than malicious discrimination, which still sucked, but wasn't that big a problem in the grand scheme of things.
A week and a half into working the front desk, and I'd really been starting to enjoy it —aside from the crushing guilt I felt for the other house men, that is. No longer was I relegated to work shirts and black work pants and my murdered out Chucks: I got to wear skirts and dresses and cute shirts as long as I wore my EconoLodge cardigan over them (plain black with the logo on the left front), and could wear dangly earrings and rings again — huzzah! My obviously alternative aesthetic drew multiple compliments from patrons every day, and one of the managers stopped me one day to ask where I'd gotten my hair done because his daughter wanted the same kind of color.
And today, on World Goth Day of all days to make the irony even more deliciously painful, I've been informed that Choice (not EconoLodge), which makes a BIG FUCKING DEAL about being all about "inclusion and diversity", is changing their dress codes to require black pants, skirts, and dresses (which is about half of my wardrobe, no big trouble there), and "conservative" hair and makeup, with "minimal" jewelry. Apparently their idea of "diversity" doesn't "include" people with my aesthetic tastes or members of alternative subcultures or lifestyles which are not currently in vogue. Seems like they'd rather I was overly (read: inappropriately) open about my sexual preferences than a fan of dark lipstick.
Strike two. I find no attitude more unprofessional that one that demands aesthetic conformity among its employees, where their styling does not actually affect their job performance.
The final straw for me will be if they demand that I change my hair color (which, unless I dye it all black, is not actually possible, because this Pravana dye stains your hair forever, and is hard as fuck to remove to any extent in order to dye over it), and refuse to allow me to simply cover it up with a scarf or something while I'm at work. My supervisor is not yet sure what the higher-ups will decide.
I don't think I'm being ridiculous in my outrage here; I'm not talking about facial piercings or tattoos even, I'm talking about hair and makeup here, particularly otherwise my very conservative hair, which is simply not a naturally-occurring color, and thus deemed "unprofessional" or otherwise worth actually complaining about. Absolutely no one has the right to tell me what I'm allowed to look like or do on my own time, especially someone who's only paying me the minimum wage allowable by law, on a part-time basis, and changing policies on me after hiring me as I am. That is ridiculous, and beyond disrespectful and unprofessional.
We'll see how things go from here, but I'm going to call up Choice tomorrow and point out the hypocrisy of these policies, if not out of any expectation that it will accomplish anything for my own sake, out of a sense of duty to myself to make my voice heard, and to those others who are unfairly affected by these kinds of discriminatory policies.
Pray for me, fam. I gonna need it.
UPDATE: I never bothered calling, but not too long after this, the hotel operations manager left and just like that, the "complaints" about my makeup vanished. I still have to cover the purple portion of my hair under a bun cover, but I can deal with that. We will have a new uniform standard in the future, which is what it is, but my makeup and jewelry should remain my own. My immediate boss has has made all the difference with her professionalism and understanding, and as I understand it, basically moved up into his old job. I'm not surprised turnover pretty much stopped once she took over, we'll just leave it at that.
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| I added a lipstick that matched my skirt before I left the house |
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| Note the brightness of the color at this point |
Fast forward to a few weeks later (which would be last week), I had finally gotten my locks redyed...
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| yaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!! :D |
...and I was getting to be actually helpful to the other house men, doing the more physical work like taking out the building trash, resupplying the housekeeping storage rooms, and doing general gofer work that sometimes involved some fairly intense physical labor, like the day they had us move eighty metal chairs of decent heft across the property:
 |
| It was so much worse than it looked |
The next day, we were tasked with moving a cooler full of drinks for some insurance fair in one of the suites, and being the go-getting idiot that I am, I volunteered to go along instead of letting the two men deal with it on their own, thinking that this cooler was going to be of a reasonable size.
 |
| Hoo boy |
As my kind of luck would have it, the owner happened to be watching, and it was at this moment that he realized which department I was in, and he decided he didn't want to have a woman in the house person department, because of the hard work it entailed. Never mind that at least one of the other house men couldn't have lifted the damned thing, either. So I was moved to the front desk exclusively, and the house men were understaffed and overworked once more.
Strike one. I joked that I'd found out that day what happens when you break a glass ceiling: maintenance comes and repairs it, and you have to fill out an incident report for your near miss because you could have hurt yourself.
Now, it took me a few days, but I'd come to forgive the boss man for making that decision, because, besides the fact that there was nothing I was going to be able to do about it, at least his sexism was only intended to protect me (or at least to protect the company from a frivolous lawsuit later if I happened to injure myself or something). More like misguided chivalry than malicious discrimination, which still sucked, but wasn't that big a problem in the grand scheme of things.
A week and a half into working the front desk, and I'd really been starting to enjoy it —aside from the crushing guilt I felt for the other house men, that is. No longer was I relegated to work shirts and black work pants and my murdered out Chucks: I got to wear skirts and dresses and cute shirts as long as I wore my EconoLodge cardigan over them (plain black with the logo on the left front), and could wear dangly earrings and rings again — huzzah! My obviously alternative aesthetic drew multiple compliments from patrons every day, and one of the managers stopped me one day to ask where I'd gotten my hair done because his daughter wanted the same kind of color.
 |
| Show me on the doll where my lipstick and hair color hurt you |
Strike two. I find no attitude more unprofessional that one that demands aesthetic conformity among its employees, where their styling does not actually affect their job performance.
The final straw for me will be if they demand that I change my hair color (which, unless I dye it all black, is not actually possible, because this Pravana dye stains your hair forever, and is hard as fuck to remove to any extent in order to dye over it), and refuse to allow me to simply cover it up with a scarf or something while I'm at work. My supervisor is not yet sure what the higher-ups will decide.
I don't think I'm being ridiculous in my outrage here; I'm not talking about facial piercings or tattoos even, I'm talking about hair and makeup here, particularly otherwise my very conservative hair, which is simply not a naturally-occurring color, and thus deemed "unprofessional" or otherwise worth actually complaining about. Absolutely no one has the right to tell me what I'm allowed to look like or do on my own time, especially someone who's only paying me the minimum wage allowable by law, on a part-time basis, and changing policies on me after hiring me as I am. That is ridiculous, and beyond disrespectful and unprofessional.
We'll see how things go from here, but I'm going to call up Choice tomorrow and point out the hypocrisy of these policies, if not out of any expectation that it will accomplish anything for my own sake, out of a sense of duty to myself to make my voice heard, and to those others who are unfairly affected by these kinds of discriminatory policies.
Pray for me, fam. I gonna need it.
UPDATE: I never bothered calling, but not too long after this, the hotel operations manager left and just like that, the "complaints" about my makeup vanished. I still have to cover the purple portion of my hair under a bun cover, but I can deal with that. We will have a new uniform standard in the future, which is what it is, but my makeup and jewelry should remain my own. My immediate boss has has made all the difference with her professionalism and understanding, and as I understand it, basically moved up into his old job. I'm not surprised turnover pretty much stopped once she took over, we'll just leave it at that.
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