3Qs: Is makeup a stepping-​​stone for working women?

While the study find­ings do not rep­re­sent an undoing of the many gains made by women, the research does have the very per­ni­cious poten­tial to argue that these expec­ta­tions for beauty in women — which can be unat­tain­able and repres­sive — are “nat­ural” according to our evo­lu­tion. It’s impor­tant that we be mindful of the solid his­tor­ical and cross-​​cultural evi­dence of the vari­ability of notions of beauty and attrac­tive­ness, as well as of com­pe­tence in the workplace.

I think those flawed assump­tions of beauty in women are all too con­ve­nient for cos­metic and beauty indus­tries to push us to increase our con­sump­tion of these products.

That would be most unfor­tu­nate. This is a dis­trac­tion that indi­vid­u­al­izes bigger prob­lems. Whether or not a woman chooses to wear makeup and how much she chooses to wear is not going to over­ride much larger social eco­nomic prob­lems, such as the shrinking pool of good job oppor­tu­ni­ties or the per­sis­tence of great eco­nomic and racial inequality in America. We need to address these issues on the larger policy-​​making and eco­nomic level and not blame the indi­vidual or make her feel as though, for example, that she is unem­ployed because she is not attrac­tive enough or didn’t work hard enough on a makeover.

As the pres­ence of women in the work­force grew in the second half of the 20th cen­tury, they were able to combat the con­trol of their bodily appear­ance through col­lec­tive efforts. Through their unions, flight atten­dants, for example, suc­cess­fully fought against con­trols imposed on their weight. Women orga­nized and fought in courts and in unions to lift bans that claimed they couldn’t work while preg­nant. In the civil rights move­ment of the 1960s, one of the main slo­gans was, “Black is Beau­tiful.” Many African-​​American women in the move­ment refused to straighten their hair. For these issues, the real change can come through col­lec­tive efforts.

Women can work for change on the polit­ical and national level to create more good jobs, to fund better oppor­tu­ni­ties for job training, to enlarge their ability to get a good edu­ca­tion and get out of these Wal­Mart jobs. Being beau­tiful and having your makeup “just right” at those jobs is not going to make a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in a woman’s ability to pro­vide for her family. If any­thing, it might hurt her to feel that she is pres­sured to spend a large por­tion of her income on cos­metic prod­ucts. She would do better to work col­lec­tively with other workers to try to get better work con­di­tions and con­tracts. We need to work at the grass­roots and national levels to change that kind of cli­mate against the average working families.