France’s lower house of parliament on Thursday, March 28, approved a bill forbidding workplace discrimination based on hair texture, which the draft law’s backers say targets mostly Black women wearing their hair naturally. The bill’s author, Olivier Serva, an independent member of the Assemblée Nationale for the overseas territory of Guadeloupe, said it would penalize any workplace discrimination based on “hairstyle, color, length or texture of hair.”
Serva, who is Black, said women “of African descent” were often encouraged before job interviews to change their style of hair. Backers of the bill also said that men who wear their hair in styles like dreadlocks are also affected.
Similar laws exist in around 20 US states which have identified hair discrimination as an expression of racism. In Britain, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has issued guidelines against hair discrimination in schools.
The bill was approved in the Assemblée Nationale lower house with 44 votes in favor and two against. It will now head to the Sénat where the right has the majority and the vote’s outcome is much less certain.
‘Target of discrimination’
A Black Air France air crew member in 2022 won a 10-year legal battle for the right to work with braided hair on flights after a decision by France’s highest appeals court.
Serva, who also included discrimination suffered by blondes and redheads in his proposal, points to an American study stating that a quarter of Black women polled said they had been ruled out for jobs because of how they wore their hair at the job interview. Such statistics are hard to come by in France, which bans the compilation of personal data that mention a person’s race or ethnic background on the basis of the French Republic’s “universalist” principles.
While statistics are difficult to come by, high-profile people have faced online harassment because of their hairstyle. In the political sphere they include former government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye, and Audrey Pulvar, a deputy mayor of Paris, whose afro look has attracted much negative comment online.
The draft law does not, in fact, contain the term “racism,” noted Daphné Bédinadé, a social anthropologist, saying the omission was problematic. “By only talking about hair discrimination, it is obscuring the problems of people whose hair is highly discriminated against, essentially Black women,” she told Le Monde. The bill’s critics say it is unnecessary, as discrimination based on looks is already banned by law.
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