DreikHimp

27/01/2022

More than skin deep, beauty salons are places of sharing and caring
What happens when people visit beauty and hair salons? Are trips to the salon simply about shaping how one looks on the outside, or can these spaces involve something deeper?

Research shows that beyond “beauty”, salons can be spaces for clients to have intimate conversations with salon workers.

This means beyond technical hair and beauty skills, working in the industry involves listening to and managing the emotions of clients.

In my research and interviews with salon workers between 2017 and 2019, most described themselves as makeshift counsellors. One sign in a Melbourne shopfront even read

Therapy is expensive, get a haircut instead, we’re great listeners.

Beyond the technical
Research conducted in the United States shows salon workers can act as “lay health educators”. Workers have close physical contact with clients and potentially access to different and diverse communities, depending on the salon.

Some US salon workers have even been engaged to assist public health campaigns, educating the general public about health issues such as melanoma, diabetes, and unintended pregnancy.

Salon workers can develop a “commercial friendship” with clients as they maintain close physical proximity with the client over a long period. But they are neutral figures in relation to emotional disclosures.

This relationship means clients may disclose more details about the troubles in their lives than they would to friends or family. UK research also shows salons are spaces where workers often provide clients with emotional support.

It’s appropriate then that initiatives have emerged across the globe to train hairdressers and other salon workers to respond to client disclosures.

In Victoria the Eastern Domestic Violence Service has been running a program called Hair-3R’s (recognise, respond and refer), to train salon workers to safely manage client disclosures of family violence.

In some US states, “cosmetologists” (hairstylists, manicurists and other salon workers) are legally required to do formal training in domestic violence and sexual assault awareness every two years to renew their salon licenses.

Though they are likely to hear distressing client disclosures, salon workers are not often trained how to cope or respond. Unsplash, CC BY
What workers signed up for?
Expecting salon workers to respond to issues such as family violence is asking a lot. Low wages and sometimes dangerous working conditions persist in the beauty industry.

When I interviewed salon workers trained in the Hair-3R’s program, I found they were relieved to be able to have frank discussions about the nature of their work, and grateful to receive support and guidance in negotiating these issues.

Research has shown salon workers are likely to have clients disclose intimate partner violence to them at some point. But workers I spoke with also mentioned a huge array of different issues clients bring up.

Marriage breakdown, mental health, suicidal ideation, gender transition and job loss were among the client issues reported by workers.

While the majority of conversations a worker has in a day or even over the course of a week may not be so “heavy”, they will likely encounter diverse and sometimes distressing stories, given the huge segment of the community they come into contact with over months and years. Many workers suggested the Hair-3Rs training was the first time they’d spoken about the emotional aspects of their work or had it recognised as something they negotiate daily.

Beyond the surface
Feminists writing about beauty have long focused on the gender expectations maintained in these spaces. From this perspective, salons have been seen as reinforcing stereotypes of how women should look and how they should maintain their bodies.

A reframing of this perspective notes the beauty industry is highly feminised, dominated by workers who are working class and often migrant women. Salon workers are represented as low-skilled “bimbos” in popular culture and the media. It is therefore no surprise the emotional nature of this line of work has remained largely hidden and both economically and culturally undervalued.

In Legally Blonde (2001) the salon relationship extends beyond grooming. IMDB
As the beauty industry continues to boom – a day spa, nail salon or laser hair removal clinic on almost every Australian street corner and dotted throughout our shopping centres – we might speculate people are accessing these services for reasons beyond maintaining appearances.

While some may lay the blame on an increasingly image-soaked world due to the popularity of social media such as Instagram, we might also look to what kind of emotional refuge the salon is providing for a world in crisis.

Further research is needed to identify what can be done to support workers in this industry, who may accidentally find themselves acting as untrained social workers or therapists with little community support or recognition.

27/01/2022

Lookism: beauty still trumps brains in too many workplaces
Universities position themselves as places where brains matter. It seems strange then that students at a US university would rate attractive academics to be better teachers. This was the finding of a recent paper from the University of Memphis, which concluded that female academics suffered most from this.

It raises an uncomfortable proposition, that beauty trumps brains even in 21st century workplaces. It would certainly be supported by veteran female broadcasters such as radio presenter Libby Purves, who recently complained about the way the BBC dispenses with women of a certain age.

Another survey, this time in the UK, gave a deeper sense of the problem. It reported that employers were asking female employees to dress “sexier” and wear make-up during video meetings.

Published by law firm Slater and Gordon over the summer, and based on a poll of 2,000 office-based staff working from home during lockdown, the report found that 35% of women had experienced at least one sexist demand from their employer, usually relating to how they dressed for video meetings. Women also reported being asked to wear more makeup, do something to their hair or dress more provocatively. Reasons offered by their bosses were that it would “help win business” and be “pleasing to a client”.

Woman on zoom call at work
Women get it worst. Girts Ragelis
It seems as though the shift to more virtual working has not eradicated what Danielle Parsons, an employment lawyer at Slater and Gordon, described as “archaic behaviour” which “has no place in the modern working world”. When employees’ performance is judged on the basis of their physical appearance, potentially shaping their pay and prospects in work, it is known as lookism. It’s not illegal, but arguably it should be.

Beauty and the boss
The Slater and Gordon survey findings affirm that many trends that we describe in our recent book, Aesthetic Labour, are widespread and continuing despite remote working. Our book reports over 20 years of research and thinking about this problem. Although our research started by focusing on frontline work in hospitality and retail, the same issue has expanded into a diverse range of roles including academics, traffic wardens, recruitment consultants, interpreters, TV news anchors and circus acrobats.

Woman acrobat performing at circus
No escaping it. David Tadevosian
Companies think that paying greater attention to employees’ appearance will make them more competitive, while public sector organisations think it will make them more liked. As a result, they are all becoming ever more prescriptive in telling employees how they should look, dress and talk.

It happens both to men and women, though more often to women, and is often tied in more broadly with sexualising them at work. For example, while Slater and Gordon found that one-third of men and women had “put up with” comments about their appearance during video calls, women were much likelier to face degrading requests to appear sexier.

When we analysed ten years of employees’ complaints about lookism to the Equal Opportunities Commission in Australia, we found that the proportion from men was rising across sectors but that two-thirds of complaints were still from women. Interestingly, the University of Memphis study found no correlation for male academics between how their looks were perceived and how their performance was rated.

Society’s obsession
Of course, workplaces cannot be divorced from society in general, and within the book we chart the increasing obsession with appearance. This aestheticisation of individuals is partly driven by the ever-growing reach and importance of the beauty industry and a huge rise in cosmetic – now increasingly labelled aesthetic – surgery.

These trends are perhaps understandable given that those deemed to be “attractive” benefit from a “beauty premium” whereby they are more likely to get a job, more likely to get better pay and more likely to be promoted. Being deemed unattractive or lacking the right dress sense can be reasons to be denied a job, but they are not illegal.

Some researchers have described an emerging aesthetic economy. Clearly this raises concerns about unfair discrimination, but without the legal protection afforded to, say, disabled people.

Not only has this trend continued during the pandemic, it might even have been compounded. With the first genuine signs of rising unemployment reported this month, research already suggests a 14-fold increase in the number of applicants for some job roles. For example, one restaurant in Manchester had over 1,000 applicants for a receptionist position, while the upmarket pub chain All Bar One reported over 500 applicants for a single bar staff role in Liverpool.

Woman pulling mask over her face
Beauty is your duty. aastock
Employers are now clearly spoilt for choice when it comes to filling available positions, and those perceived to be better looking will likely have a better chance. We know from research by the University of Strathclyde’s Tom Baum and his colleagues that the hospitality industry was precarious and exploitative enough even before COVID.

It all suggests that lookism is not going away. If we are to avoid the archaic practices of the old normal permeating the new normal, it is time to rethink what we expect from the workplace of the future. One obvious change that could happen is making discrimination on the basis of looks illegal. That would ensure that everyone, regardless of their appearance, has equal opportunity in the world of work to come.

27/01/2022

Distance learning: How to avoid falling into ‘techno traps’
As another virtual university semester unfolds — the second or even third for some since the beginning of the pandemic — fatigue and declining satisfaction with this remote format seem to be increasingly felt on both sides of the screen.

On the one hand, there are students worried about the quality of the courses they are taking, but above all, they are missing out on campus and community life. On the other hand, there are teachers feeling breathlessly short of resources, who have been pushed overnight to change their practices and run their classes from home.

Beyond the purely pedagogical impacts, the issue of mental health for everyone is of concern today. Having personally had to give online courses to more than 250 undergraduate students over these past weeks, I have been able to experience these issues and to feel the limits of this new way of teaching.

Succulent plants on a laptop.
Students and professors are feeling fatigued with screens. (Shutterstock)
Web influencer or academic expert?
The temptation — but also often the pressure — to draw out a host of technological tools to capture and maintain the attention of students or facilitate their collaboration is often very strong. Certainly, the idea of teaching a class live on Twitch or in a fictional world on Minecraft and then continuing the discussion on Discord or Slack can be exciting. But in this particular context, the teacher is sometimes more of a online influencer than an academic expert.

These technological choices also confront teachers with limits, both logistical and human. What can we say to the many students who access this content from their cell phones and therefore from their cellular data, or to those who do not yet have a computer and a high-performance internet connection?

What to do with students who have to share their workspace with the rest of the family, who don’t have a good grasp of these different tools or who have to learn how to use a range of different applications for each of their courses?

These issues also illustrate the very real risk of creating new barriers to inclusion in education.

Read more: Online learning during COVID-19: 8 ways universities can improve equity and access

So, before mobilizing such hardware, it is important to consider not only the ability of students to grasp it, but also the ability of teachers to train themselves sufficiently to offer a positive learning experience. More importantly, this is also an opportunity to learn about other modes of distance education and finally to move away from a vision requiring more and more tools and overstimulation.

A more human approach
What if one of the answers to the challenges of distance learning is to go back to basics and set up contexts that are less “techno” and more human?

In their work on the experience economy, consultants Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore explore how value can be created based on the experience of “guests” (whether as consumers in shops or visitors to museums). They propose four categories for experience: educational, entertainment, escapist and esthetic. “Esthetic” experiences, they argue, are those in which participants are invited to adopt a contemplative posture. The experience then aims at harmony of the senses and attaining a kind of individual fullness.

An example of that could be a visit to a museum, where people walk around, sit on a bench and get lost in their thoughts. It contrasts sharply with an entertainment experience such as a music show or an amusement park. It’s a celebration of slowness, of a more subtle but equally engaging non-technological stimulation.

Read more: The 'slow professor' could bring back creativity to our universities

This kind of call for a slower, more informal pedagogical approach isn’t new. Moreover, the idea of lowering the pace, or to prune the content a little to facilitate retention without affecting the quality, was slowly gaining ground long before the pandemic.

A guy listening to music.
Offering podcast courses or transmitting evaluations via audio not only gives you a break, but also gives you more flexibility as to when and where to view this content. (Shutterstock)
Create an atmosphere conducive to reflection
So, instead of using yet another collaborative tool during a Zoom course, why not simply create an atmosphere conducive to reflection through a warm decor, a little nature, something to watch or music that is pleasant to listen to?

Similarly, why not open the virtual rooms earlier, or close them later, for those who want to exchange in a more informal setting. Why not send the content in advance so as to take advantage of these so-called “synchronous moments” to interact and inject some human warmth?

Finally, it is possible to enhance non-visual stimuli to allow students to take a break from their screens for even a brief moment. The simple act of recording podcast episodes or transmitting assessments via audio not only gives students a break for their eyes but also offers more flexibility in when and where they can view the content. The opportunity has also come to rediscover the charms of a simple telephone conversation, instead of another videoconference.

Since this virtual mode of teaching is expected to continue at least until next fall or winter and to play a greater role in university curricula after the pandemic, it is not too late to imagine modes of engagement that are more mindful of individual constraints.

According to Pine and Gilmore, any good experience must be thought of in the broader context in which it takes place. So, rather than relying on the equivalent of an online lecture, let’s reconsider. Keep in mind the constraints of the moment and imagine courses that allow you to vary the contexts in which you immerse yourself, whether it’s by the fire or even under the comforter!

27/01/2022