Why Female Newscasters Have the Same Hair from buzai232's blog

Why Female Newscasters Have the Same Hair

Esther Katro was 22 when she landed her first job as a reporter at a local TV station in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The recent graduate loved the thrill of breaking news and being on air. But when she was out chasing stories in the college town, people kept mistaking her for a student. She went to her news director for advice, and his response had nothing to do with developing her fledgling reporting skills. “He was like, ‘You have to cut your hair to look older,’” she recalled.To get more news about wig shop, you can visit monahair.com official website.

Katro hated the idea. She’d had long, dark hair flowing well past her shoulders for her entire life. But she desperately wanted to be seen as professional. So she booked an appointment at a local salon.

“I remember sitting at my desk in Arkansas and Googling ‘short anchor hair,’ and seeing what came up,” she said. “I went [to the salon] and told them ‘I want to look older; give me a sophisticated cut to my jawline.’”

If you’ve ever tuned in to your local 6 o’clock news, or simply stared mindlessly at the CNN feed blaring on the screen by your airport gate, you’ll recognize the cut Katro got that day: hair that falls between the chin and collarbone; sleek strands are blown out to perfection, not a flyaway in sight. Light layers and a heavy coat of hairspray lift the roots and frame the face in all the right ways. It’s neither too big nor too flat, the texture magically landing somewhere between a helmet and a halo.

It's a favorite among Fox News personalities, like Martha Maccallum, Shannon Bream, and Ainsley Earhardt; you'll see it on Megyn Kelly who's now at NBC. It's not partisan — it's everywhere, from big networks to small local outfits, no matter the anchors' preferred look. “It didn’t match my age,” Katro says, “but it was a professional cut.”

It’s the omnipresent anchor bob. And it’s no coincidence. The longstanding homogeneity of on-air hair, from Topeka, Kansas to Trenton, New Jersey — reporters and industry veterans say — is by design.Hair isn’t the only way in which women are held to high aesthetic standards on TV, but it’s one of the most shapeable — and ubiquitous — elements of the newscaster uniform. So what are the so-called rules of on-air hair? Anchors, reporters, and industry experts interviewed for this piece laid them out: Wear your hair down, in a smooth style that hits at the collarbone or above. Updos and complicated styles are a no, as are drastic color changes. Youthful appearance is key (better dye those grays away!). A bit of wave is okay (and increasingly popular at some stations), but ringlets and kinky curls are not.

It's not just perception, either. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, analyzed more than 400 publicity images for local broadcast journalists and found that 95.8 percent of female anchors and reporters had smooth hair. About two-thirds had short or medium-length cuts. Nearly half of the women were blond. Zero had gray hair. Just one black woman in the UT study sample wore her natural curls.

The style standards are a result of longstanding requirements that female reporters not only do their jobs, but “fulfill larger audience expectations of what women are supposed to look like,” says Mary Angela Bock, a UT assistant professor and lead author of the study. That ideal look “is stereotypically heteronormative, not overly sexy, and predictable.”

Sometimes, anchors’ contracts even go as far as explicitly preventing women from changing their appearance without a manager’s approval. Stations frequently hire consultants to help increase viewership, and they make recommendations on hairstyles in addition to news segments and set design.

Kamady Rudd, now an anchor at ABC affiliate WZZM in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recalls being asked during multiple job interviews whether she’d cut her hair into something that more closely resembled an anchor bob (her current station didn’t make such a request). Consultants have told her to tease her roots to add body. “It’s one cut for everyone,” she says. “They want you to be trendy, but not too trendy. They want you to look nice, but not too nice. It has to be on this really fine line.”

Even when it’s not an explicit order, the message to women in the industry is clear. “It was always one of those things where it was like, 'We’d really like you do to this,'” she says. “I’ve never known anyone where it was an ultimatum, it was just highly suggested.”

Jana Shortal, now an anchor and reporter at the NBC affiliate KARE in Minneapolis, also felt those messages acutely throughout her early career. “One of the first things they’ll tell you as a woman in broadcast is you can’t have curly hair,” says Shortal, who, as you might guess, has naturally curly hair. “It wasn’t that I had this big, bad, mean boss-man telling me I was ugly every day. There were slight suggestions that I would hear that were like, ‘You do realize this is a visual medium?’”