Why most female newscasters have the same hair | Hacker News Reader

Why most female newscasters have the same hair

instyle.com

57 pointsrustcharm44 comments

If we draw an analogy to stagecraft and "Ann Anchor" is a character from a popular play, it isn't unreasonable to expect a performer to dress up for a role. Actors sometimes go as far as losing or gaining weight or muscle mass to better fit a role. Like the theatre, television is show business.

Beauty standards are narrower for women in TV because beauty standards are narrower for women period. Decades of feminism have done nothing to change the fact that being beautiful and fashionable is still far more important for women than for men.

TV executives don't personally care how anchors look. They care about viewer numbers and everything you see on screen is optimised toward that. If having a particular look boosts the numbers, then they will want that look. If having two heads boosted the numbers, they'd want that too. It's no different than politics: Only the voters can be blamed for electing bad politicians.

It seems like all the arguments about hairstyles are about how important it is for the broadcaster. If it’s so important to them, how about they help foot the bill?

Presumably, because the broadcaster is able to find another employee who is willing to foot the bill.

I disagree about your last statement: "Only the voters can be blamed for electing bad politicians"

If someone controls which subset of choices you are allowed to pick from, and you choose the one you like the most out of those options, that first someone is still to blame for limiting your choice.

Nobody controls who can vote for who in any functioning democracy. There are governments that are better than others at manifesting the will of the voters; I like the sound of Switzerland myself.

Practically speaking, "voters" as a bloc aren't organised enough to excercise that so so you get effects where a party will develop a brand then endorse a candidate who is sufficiently aligned with that brand. This isn't some scheme foisted upon them, this is an implicit equilibrium that will be found in any democratic system. I've got long argument about why that happens that I don't want to type here, but it is hardly an undesirable outcome from the perspective of an ordinary citizen. There is an argument against systems where the mathematical equilibrium is 2 parties, but that in no way removes the responsibility of voters for outcomes. If they care, they should organise an alternative. Nothing stopping them except the fact that creating a large brand is hard.

> Nobody controls who can vote for who in any functioning democracy.

You mean vote for which of the two candidates?

Assuming you are talking about America, I am not very familiar with the situation but a quick google ([1]) suggests there were ~1,800 candidates with something like 8 different options with notable representation.

Also, afaik, everyone is welcome to join a political party and scrum with the best of them to get good nominees through. It isn't fast or easy, but America's political process tilts a little on the slow-and-steady side for things like that.

Also note that being a democracy doesn't mean that scribbling on a bit of paper is the limit of what can be done. Voter apathy and the inherent complexity of running a 300 million person country remains the big problem.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_election,_2016

> Beauty standards are narrower for women in TV because beauty standards are narrower for women period. Decades of feminism have done nothing to change the fact that being beautiful and fashionable is still far more important for women than for men.

IME women comment (judge) way more frequently on styling and looks of other women than men ("nice").

Women judge and police each other openly, yes, but men tend to judge women silently. That means if a man doesn't find a woman attractive he'll just ignore her (or act polite but curt).

Yes, some men will openly judge and mock women's appearances. These men tend to have a lot of other behaviour problems though.

Both men and women will tend to be polite but brief with a person they are not attracted to (in the context that the other person is trying to develop a romantic relationship). That is completely normal and I think it's fine and healthy.

Feminism will struggle against the tendency of women's attraction to be more heavily weighted by appearance than by character or economic status like men are.

I feel like from there men and women have organized themselves and their "competition" according to the criteria set by the opposite sex. Women will become more critical of other women's appearances and men will be more critical of masculine criteria (how much money do you make, can you defend yourself, are you tough/independent/emotionally stable) including penis size, because that is oh so important to making a woman happy.

Maybe men and women impose the harshest standards on themselves because they want to appease the opposite side more. And maybe even though it's true that those are characteristics we value in the opposite sex, we don't objectify the opposite sex as much as they objectify themselves.

Some men and women will resent the way they are "judged", blaming their "judges" for their feelings of inferiority. Some men and women will try to capitalize on the others insecurity to their own gain. Mostly the inferiority is self imposed.

It's a strange balance to acknowledge that (for example) appearances are important, and that it will be more difficult for either sex, particularly women, to find a partner if they don't take care of their appearances. And while that might be true acknowledging that you aren't an object and subjective qualities outside of the rubric of attraction actually do matter and are valuable to people you want to attract.

I don't think attraction will ever be negotiated, and that's where feminism will fail and frustrate people. It might become more taboo to admit you like her cause she's a lingerie model, or that he's a catch because he makes 7 figures, but those things are always going to make a person stand out no matter how angry or inferior it makes us feel.

There are many situations where those things won't make a person stand out, at least not in a positive light.

You describe a landscape that exists, but there are many other landscapes interleaved. We have some degree of control over which landscapes we choose to engage.

Feminism/Anarchism is not about making the "beauty+money" landscape go away, it's about helping people find situations when they can opt out of it.

Feminism and anarchy seem to target an entire culture. It really doesn't focus on the individual more than the collective. I think that necessarily manipulates all of these land scapes.

If it becomes transphobic to not date a trans person, purely on the basis of them being transgender, it necessarily affects everyone who interacts with a trans person who hits on them.

If it becomes sexist to watch and produce porn that can be interpreted as degrading to women, it necessarily changes decisions the porn that all people watch. If it is sexist for women to not be represented 50/50 for specifically high paying tech jobs, it necessarily affects that works with women or own a tech company. It almost certainly will make those changes through coercion rather than eliminating sexism in the interview process. People will pretend like all of these changes are justified but deep down it doesn't change the way we think and it only builds resentments against movements which restrict and criticise behaviors which are fair.

Some of the issues that these movements take on simply do not have a place for choice. It affects the entire landscape.

Helping women deal with "unrealistic beauty standards" would not work by ensuring that men don't prioritize or advertise with women that are beautiful (if you raise a bit and glorify images of women who are traditionally considered ugly, it will not work). If a boy is castrated at birth through a medical accident, and is raised as a girl and even given hormones, it still doesn't change traditionally male behaviors and sexual preference. People are not blank slates and I think we need to be careful that we set up a society that fundamentally works against ones nature.

Not that we should give in to every impulse, but I hope you can see what I'm getting at. At a work interview, women should be measured only in merit. Under the law, men and women should not be treated differently, except in manners that can only affect women or men (abortion, circumcision, etc.) In a social system, changing the way that people think about their attraction to women is just twisted.

I think it would be better to work on an individual level to help a person change the way they think about themselves to resolve the self esteem issues that photoshopped advertisements, or cookie cutter models and newscasters produce.

> It almost certainly will make those changes through coercion rather than eliminating sexism in the interview process

Why do you say that? You're basically presuming bad faith. Eliminating sexism in the interview process is exactly what anti-bias recruiting tries to do.

> it only builds resentments against movements which restrict and criticise behaviors which are fair

Not only that. It also helps get better people into the positions where they can be more effective, which leads to a more productive economy overall. The resentment is an unfortunate (I think inevitable) side effect.

To me the wage gaps are evidence that we're not using the labor force effectively, that there are talented women and people of color who are not getting into jobs where their skills are adequately leveraged. So getting them into better positions means companies will be more successful. The statistics suggest that some of the men in these positions don't deserve to be there and are holding their organizations back.

I understand you interpret the data in a different way, that some things just make men and white people more valuable. Differences aside, can you see that these interpretations are subjective and the data doesn't actually differentiate between "the women are just less capable" and "the process is not promoting the best people"? Those two realities are indistinguishable from pay data alone, which is why the stats become a Rorschach test for peoples' beliefs about gender differences.

Not sure how to engage the rest of your argument... I definitely wouldn't say people are blank slates, nor would I deny that gender differences exist. The vast majority of feminists don't think those things, those positions are straw men that anti-feminists like to bring up because they are easy to argue against.

> Not sure how to engage the rest of your argument... I definitely wouldn't say people are blank slates, nor would I deny that gender differences exist. The vast majority of feminists don't think those things, those positions are straw men that anti-feminists like to bring up because they are easy to argue against.

Not to derail the conversation too much, but why does the extreme seem to be accepted as ok by the left? Kids as young as 8 are getting hormone treatments to try and change their gender. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/transgender-children-getting-...

I myself see this as child abuse. It's a life altering decision made by a child who is too young to understand the consequences. If you don't see this as harmful, you can ignore the rest of this comment, because then I don't have an argument. But if you do see this as a problem, why don't you and others on the left speak out against it?

This is what scares me about you guys. Some of you preach moderation, but you all seem fine with things be taken as far as they can go.

> wage gaps are evidence that we're not using the labor force effectively

That is only true if we view wages as the only factor in job selection and priority. If we accept that men are greater impacted by wealth through attraction and social status then we also should accept that those should create a bias in how prioritized wealth is.

And as could be guessed, that is exactly what studies show. When given multiple choices, men tend to choose higher wages over other work benefits. An employer that tries to maximize the effectiveness of the labor force might do so by providing the maximal amount of benefit to their employees. Worse, if they try to predict the needs of the their employees the wage gap would be created even if individual employees don't share the overall priority of their group.

We could fix the wage gap statistics by trying to convert all aspects of work that an employee values into a common unit. Job satisfaction could be such metric but normally wages are not considered a part of it so in a mirror reflection of the wage gap, there is a identical gap in job satisfaction that favors women.

Instead of looking at this as a gendered issue, simply apply some general concept for human behavior. Members within a social ranked group is less limited or more willing to openly police and criticize aspects that defines social status, while non-members adhere and reinforces the social status through silent judgment and selectiveness.

If we apply this generally we would predict to see men openly judge and police each other on the basis of wealth and professional titles (which mostly operate as a proxy for wealth). Similar a woman who doesn't find that a man is worthy will just ignore him or be curt.

I wonder if we don't see the exact same pattern to other social ranked groups such as for example religious communities and political parties.

Those two claims are not at odds. A lot of the social expectations for women are enforced by women: that doesn't change the fact that they're still social expectations for women.

This is unrelated to fashion and admittedly had no major purpose, but I’d like to see newscasters and presenters pick up on mid Atlantic English again.

It makes it easier to listen to when you don’t have to tune your ear to weird local (and lazy) accents.

Beauty Standards for women are narrower? Men all wear the same suit to formal events.

"Because society is sexist against women, society should be sexist against women."

Do 95.8 percent of female newscasters have the same hair? I don't see it. Whats the source of that number? Where are the examples? All I see in the article is advertising and counter examples.

From what I can tell, the women in news just like the women in real life seem to change their hairdo every other day.

here's that video from earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khbihkeOISc

this sample doesn't look like 96%, but still pretty high up there.

According to the article, it refers to the percentage who have straight hair.

Thanks, I see the critical line in the article now:

"95.8 percent of female anchors and reporters had smooth hair"

That is a totally different statement from the title to me.

Almost all, actually probably ALL the women in my professional circles have smooth hair too. Some of them get it straightened at a parlor. It may have something to do with where I'm located as well.

TV is so dying, they don't even know it.

In one way, I'm worried about the quality of news reporting now when traditional media is slowly withering away, but since they are focusing on haircuts, I don't think it really matter. The quality journalism is already mostly gone, and what's left can be found in a small number of online and print publications, read by a small number of people.

This seems kinda tangential to the article, which does not even begin to touch on why of those issues.

It's not that TV is dying, it's that monocultures are contracting. They will grow again, but won't reach the same heights.

The haircuts need to be one way, because the anchors are trying to reach as large an audience as possible. If they were speaking only to, say, soccer fans, they would have other choices. Same is true for many other audiences. But if you want to go for a "universal" audience, you have to go to the lowest common denominator.

The internet has turned that on its head. You actually can sustainably run a news show for soccer fans only, and be financially successful. Whereas before the distribution costs were too high to allow anything other than mass market news brands.

However, we shant over-extrapolate here. It turns out that many people actually identify more with the "big middle" than with any little subcultures. They enjoy standard, "basic" stuff. They want no fuss, and they like universal appeal. They don't like balkanization. Perhaps they were part of a tight knit tribe, and they don't want to go back to that.

For this reason, I would call this moment a "contract" of mass media, not a death of it. I think these generic brands will contract, but in doing so will find their core audience. People who are not alienated by the "anchor bob" but comforted by it.

Skimmed around for mentioning color keying but didn't find anything. That being said, I've long noticed the weird uniform of it all. And if you are on Sinclair or Fox you have to be blonde.

A few years ago I was in an art and technology exhibit. One of the neater exhibits was a scrape of all the profile pictures on Yahoo personals (this was a while ago) and all the women's photos looked the same and the men's were all over the place with hats or props it was rather crazy to see. I keep thinking of peacocks whenever I remember back on it.

They are optimizing for their audience. Like this: https://twitter.com/JRehling/status/1029374020037238784?s=19

The GDPR blocker doesn't go away even if you accept.

I get "Request has been terminated Possible causes: the network is offline, Origin is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin, the page is being unloaded, etc." when I press accept

Yeah, slowly we realise that GDPR was too good to be true. And indeed, it is bad.

Well, it's mostly news sites that get their money from advertising and tracking that have the gdpr-walls, I haven't really seen it anywhere else.

For now it's mostly ... interesting.

Archived copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180915094558/https://www.insty...

Alas, the photos are missing:

https://cdn-img.instyle.com/sites/default/files/styles/684xf...

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