Jeanne Thompson began going grey at 23. She coloured her hair for years as she worked her way into management at a large Boston-area financial services company, then gave up the dye for good about a year ago.
The Earth didn't shake, and the 44-year-old Thompson was promoted to top management the following year.
She is among a new type of grey panther, a woman who aspires to do well and get ahead on the job while happily maintaining a full head of grey.
"Women put pressure on themselves to colour, she said. "It's a bold statement to be grey because it's saying, ‘You know what? I did let my hair go, but I'm not letting myself go.'"
But not everyone finds it so easy.
Laws, of course, exist to ward off discrimination in the workplace, yet legions of men and women have no interest in letting their grey fly.
But grey heads have been popping up on runways and red carpets, on models and young celebrities for months. There's Kelly Osbourne — via dye — and Hollywood royalty such as Helen Mirren, the Oscar-winning British actress.
Tricky issue
Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund chief, is one of the most powerful women in the world, and she keeps her hair grey. So does Essie Weingarten, founder and now creative director of the nail polish company Essie Cosmetics. For regular working women, it's a trickier issue.
"I don't think a woman in the workplace is going to follow that trend," David Scher, a civil rights attorney in Washington, said with a laugh. "I think women in the workplace are highly pressured to look young. If I were an older working person, the last thing I would do is go grey."
"While the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 was created to protect employees 40 years of age and older, some may still encounter ageism in the workplace," said Stephanie Martinez Kluga, a manager for Insperity, a Houston-based company that provides human resources services to small and medium-size businesses.
"The perception that men with grey hair are experienced and women with grey hair are old may still be an issue that affects employees in America," she said.
Some grey panthers also offer strong words of caution about exactly how well those anti-discrimination laws work.
Anne Kreamer is grey and proud, but she didn't unleash the colour until she left her day job to become self-employed. She dedicates a chapter of her 2007 book Going Grey to workplace issues.
"We fool ourselves with our dyed hair," said the Harvard-educated Kreamer, a former Nickelodeon executive who helped launch the magazine Spy before writing a book exploring her journey to silver.
In context
When it comes to grey on the job, Kreamer said, context counts. The colour might be easier in academia over high-tech, for instance, and in Minneapolis over Los Angeles.
In 1950, 7 per cent of women dyed their hair, she said. Today, it's closer to 95 per cent, depending on location.
Sandra Rawline, 52, in Houston knows how complicated it can be. A trial is scheduled for June in her federal lawsuit accusing her boss at Capital Title of Texas of ordering her to dye her grey hair in 2009, when her office moved to a swankier part of town. It accuses him of instructing her to wear "younger, fancier suits" and jewellery, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The reason we know about Rawline and Lagarde and Weingarten and Mirren and — let's throw in NBCUniversal exec Lauren Zalaznick — is that their grey strands stand out.
Weingarten, 62, began going grey at 18 and said she coloured for years. She gave it up about 20 years ago.
"People would say, ‘You have to colour your hair,'" she said. "I was an entrepreneur. I could do whatever I wanted, but the truth is a lot of women are petrified to show grey hair."
Not acceptable
The "grey movement" doesn't keep tabs on membership, but blogs such as Terri Holley's Going Grey are proliferating, along with pro-grey Facebook fan pages and Twitter feeds.
"Society has boxed in women on what's considered to be beautiful," Holley said. "People say, ‘I'm so glad that we're having this conversation.'"
Dana King, 53, started going grey in her twenties, began dyeing in her thirties and went to work for San Francisco's KPIX in 1997, rising to news anchor. In January 2010, she approached her general manager, a man whom she had known for a decade, about her giving up the dye.
"He didn't like the idea," King said. She did it anyway, with the comfort of a no-cut contract good to May 2013.
King knows her road to grey wouldn't have gone so well had she been a TV news star elsewhere. "I would have been fired had I worked in some other markets. I have no illusions about what I've done and I'm good with that."
