Professionalism is a bias-making machine that needs to end. Here's how to dismantle it.

Ten years ago, after spending hours detangling, washing, conditioning, and twisting her hair, she had a meeting where a white colleague remarked, "You wouldn't wear your hair like that if you were still in corporate America," Opie, who is Black, said. That colleague, she added, still had wet hair down to her shoulders.

"She felt comfortable questioning me about my hairstyle, which took hours to achieve, but didn't think twice about coming to work with wet hair," Opie said. "It shows how anti-Black bias works and how privilege works."

The comment about Opie's twist out was a crystallizing moment. It showed how the merits of professionalism could often be an "exclusionary tool," she said, in a way that has nothing to do with being able to execute a task, whether it's your accent, body size, or quietness.

Last week, a piece of legislation targeting discrimination like the kind Opie experienced passed in the House of Representatives, which sent it to the Senate. Called the CROWN Act — the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act — the legislation would ban hair discrimination at work. And at Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, at least one administrator is grappling with how to advise business students with natural hair.

Professionalism is, by its provenance, a legacy of elites. White men of a certain class created what we now know as corporate America, so the norms of that still majority culture are what everybody else must assimilate themselves to if they want to move up in the world. Such customs include speaking in a white American dialect, concealing tattoos or piercings, and wearing the right thing, whether that's business suits or Patagonia vests. Yet research has shown that if a workplace culture pressures employees into conformity, workers are more exhausted, less engaged, less committed, and more likely to move on.

The Oxford business historian Christopher McKenna, who wrote the book on professionalization, said that when elite professional services like management consulting, venture capital, and investment banking began to rise in the 1930s, these firms attuned to social expectations of what "elite" looked like.

"You may be offering something new, but you do so in a traditional professional office, with people wearing suits who went to the right universities and live in the right suburbs," McKenna said.

In England, it was an Oxford degree and an Etonian accent. In Germany, they learned to spot men with saber wounds on their cheeks, since fencing was a pastime of high-class families.

"One of the moves that professionalism makes is universalizing a certain style of behavior that is white and male as the normative standard by which everybody should be held accountable," said Christy Glass, a Utah State University sociologist who has conducted many studies on the hidden mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion.

"When you don't and simply can't conform to that imagined standard of professionalism," she said, you're likely excluded from recruitment or advancement based on a lack of "professionalism" or "professional presentation."

To Opie, the "Great Resignation" has been a great liberation. "I want to be seen and heard and valued in the workplace," she hears workers saying with their resignation notices. "If that won't happen here, I'll pursue other avenues."

'All of this is a form of gaslighting'

Historical trends color modern biases.

"When professional roles are dominated by any group, in this case, elite white men, our brains tend to conflate the qualifications for those roles with the social characteristics of the incumbents," Glass said.

After Opie's fateful interaction with her colleague, the banker turned consultant and Babson College associate professor led a study that found Black women were rated as less professional when wearing dreadlocks or Afros than white women or Black women wearing straightened hair. Other industry data showed women were much more likely to get personality-based feedback, like to watch their tone. Separate research suggested Black and Latino men who came from underrepresented backgrounds were viewed as lacking polish or leadership potential, while comparable white men were seen as coachable.

These biases are shown in the research and productized in the marketplace. Consider the multitude of training offerings meant to, as Glass said, "fix the women" — seminars where you're told not only how to dress, do your hair, and present yourself but also how to negotiate (but not too hard) and be assertive (without being too much).

"All of this is a form of gaslighting," Glass, who is white, said. "It's saying that there are these objective professional standards, and if you don't meet them, that's your fault, and you just need to be more or less or different and you wouldn't face this bias and discrimination."

'Inclusion isn't that warm and fuzzy feeling of belonging'

Conforming is exhausting.

That's one of the big takeaways from Patricia Hewlin's years of interviewing people about their lives at work. The urge to conform is intuitive, the banker turned McGill University management scholar said. It's a way of making sure an interaction goes smoothly, but it comes at an emotional cost. And if every employee of color feels that cost at your company, retaining them is going to be hard.

"Inclusion isn't that warm and fuzzy feeling of belonging," she said. "Inclusion is about being an integral part of the system, and that means having the resources to get the job done, and being part of the people in the know, and really knowing what it takes to be successful."

Hewlin, who is Black, said tools like employee surveys and focus groups could illuminate day-to-day practices in a company, like how candidates and employees are evaluated and who gets recognized in meetings. And employee-resource groups can also gather feedback to be shared with the top of the organization so that it can move forward.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business is also building feedback into its system. Since 2018, the school's diversity committee hands out an Amplifier Award to an instructor. The honor is given to a faculty member who handles debate in an inclusive way and brings in case studies and speakers from underrepresented groups, countries, and industries.

With a bottom-up approach, "there's less chance of replicating that same sort of professional standard, which ends up being discriminatory," Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, the school's lead strategist for diversity, equity, and inclusion, said.

"If we aren't relying on outdated norms like professionalism that have embedded in them ways of inadvertently discriminating against people who don't look or fit the mold, then what do we substitute that with?" Nishiura Mackenzie, who is Japanese American, added.

'You have to begin to unpeel it'

Moving from "professional" standards to objective standards is complicated.

According to Glass, the guiding principle is to strip out "discretion" in making talent evaluations to make things as objective as possible, with the fewest identity markers. In one highly cited study of orchestra auditions, simply adding a physical screen between evaluators and the performers they were listening to — but could not see — led to more women getting jobs.

Yet McKenna, the Oxford historian, said objective measures carried their own risks — if a company is measuring performance by work hours, then the people who succeed will be those who can sustain that lifestyle.

The inequities are so often built into the institutional systems themselves.

Opie, the Babson associate professor, recalled doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work with a law firm, looking over how it evaluated the performance of their lawyers. After some prodding, she learned that one of the metrics for success was how often a lawyer was "first chair" on a case — a position heavily influenced by client preference.

"Now we have an issue," she remembered saying. Science has shown we generally prefer (and hire) people similar to us, a phenomenon called homophily. Her recommendation was to instead evaluate law briefs with author names hidden, which gets closer to an objective evaluation of who's succeeding in their duties.

"You have to begin to unpeel it because this seemingly objective question, 'How many times has this attorney served this first chair?'" Opie said. "It's actually a loaded question."