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From Vox
Free the wrinkle -
Getty Images
The pandemic could help Americans finally embrace aging skin.
Consider the wrinkle.
Formed when skin loses elasticity over time, wrinkles are one of the hallmarks of the aging process. Though everyone’s skin ages differently, almost all of us can expect to see at least a few creases as the years go by.
Despite (or perhaps because of) their universality, wrinkles remain one of the most stigmatized aspects of human appearance: there’s a nearly $200 billion industry devoted to smoothing them out, filling them in, and (supposedly) preventing them from cropping up in the first place.
“We live in a patriarchal, heterosexist, capitalist society where if wrinkles and signs of aging are held forth as a problem, we can be persuaded to buy shit,” Ashton Applewhite, author of the book This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, told Vox.
The stigma against wrinkles has been remarkably stubborn — for example, while a movement toward body positivity and size diversity has led to more brands highlighting models above a size 6 (though not always making larger clothes for actual customers), it’s still rare to see a wrinkled face in ads, even for brands aimed at older women.
But this might be starting to change, especially since the pandemic has Americans rethinking their relationship to their appearance in all kinds of ways. After letting their roots grow out in lockdown, some are embracing gray hair. Experts are offering advice for accepting changes to our bodies after a traumatic year, including weight gain and aging skin. Celebrities like Katie Couric and Justine Bateman are posing without makeup and making an effort to normalize faces that change with time. And Kate Winslet recently made headlines for insisting that her wrinkles go un-retouched on posters for HBO’s Mare of Easttown.
The bias against aging skin has deep roots in American culture, and in some ways seems as entrenched as ever — see, for instance, the supposed “Zoom boom,” a rise in plastic surgery among people tired of looking at their faces on video calls. But the last year has also been a time of rejecting beauty norms that seemed increasingly onerous or pointless, as well as growing awareness around the problems of ageism, as many advocates pushed back on the idea that the elderly and others who were especially vulnerable to Covid-19 were somehow disposable. And after a period of unprecedented trauma, more people may be interested in embracing what wrinkles mean — that you’ve been lucky enough to make it to old age.
“The culture is absolutely moving in the right direction,” Applewhite said.
Wrinkle stigma has a long history
Anti-aging treatments are far from new. Cosmetic modifications to the face date back to ancient Egypt, if not earlier, Zakia Rahman, a clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford University, told Vox. Many early treatments involved acids applied to the skin to stimulate collagen production and give a more youthful appearance.
Later, in the 16th and 17th centuries, European women applied meat or wine to their faces in order to smooth out wrinkles (wine maybe kind of worked, according to Pacific Standard). A more drastic measure, the facelift, debuted in the early 1900s: a surgeon would make cuts around the hairline and pull the skin taut, reducing the appearance of wrinkles. Then, in 2002, came a game-changer: Botox was approved for cosmetic use. A toxin produced by bacteria, Botox paralyzes facial muscles, smoothing out wrinkles or even preventing them from forming in the first place.
“The history of skin care may one day be divided into its own epochs: B.B. (Before Botox) and A.B. (After Botox),” Allure declared in 2007.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
During the 2009 recession, laid-off workers were given free Botox injections during an event called the “Botox Bailout” in Arlington, Virginia.
But another development may have been even more influential in the history of aging and body image: the smartphone. With the rise of mobile devices and social media, the sheer number of images we’re exposed to every day has increased dramatically in recent years. Many of these images are carefully curated, with lighting, filters, and in some cases Photoshop, allowing users to present only idealized versions of themselves. But the photos we see, however edited they may be, “give us ideas of what is normal and what is beautiful,” Rahman said. “And oftentimes, we think that these images represent reality.”
“I’ve certainly seen in my practice that more and more people are coming in wanting to look like an image that they’ve seen on Instagram or a video they bring on TikTok,” Rahman added.
The same distorted reality is evident in Hollywood, where, it seems, only men’s faces wrinkle as they age. The double standard is clear in TV shows like 2020’s The Undoing, in which Hugh Grant displayed the lined face of a 60-year-old man (he is 60), while Nicole Kidman, 53, appeared preternaturally smooth-skinned. And the onslaught of images like this can lead to pressure to look a certain way as we get older — as well as judgment if we don’t. “Visible signs of aging are held against us, especially women,” Applewhite said.
And it’s not just about critical comments. Older women can face ageism in workplaces and in hiring, with one 2017 study showing that the older a woman was, the less likely she was to hear back from prospective employers about job applications. Given this, it’s not a shock that many women would fear the tell-tale signs that age leaves on their faces. “The discrimination is real,” Applewhite said.
The body positivity movement has moved the needle — but only a little
In recent years, movements around body positivity have sought to expand definitions of beauty beyond the thin, white, young ideal that so often dominates mainstream fashion and media. Beginning around 2008, for example, body positivity advocates began posting photos, essays, and poetry on Tumblr and Facebook in an effort to “normalize being bigger and being happy, or being bigger and just being comfortable in your skin,” Stephanie Yeboah, a blogger and author of the book Fattily Ever After: A Black Fat Girl’s Guide to Living Life Unapologetically. Predominantly led by “larger fat Black women,” the movement was “a safe space for marginalized bodies to come together and celebrate and normalize ourselves,” Yeboah said.
Over time, body positivity entered the mainstream, with brands featuring more plus-size models and offering clothes in larger sizes. And that also translated to a more inclusive definition of beauty beyond just size, Yeboah said, as more campaigns began to feature disabled or older models as well. UK retailer Marks & Spencer, for example, has used older women in ads, as have fashion houses Lanvin and Céline (the latter famously featured 80-year-old Joan Didion in a 2015 campaign that quickly went viral).
However, the mainstream embrace of body positivity has its limits. Even when brands use plus-size models, they often choose white or white-passing women with hourglass figures and small stomachs — people who are seen as “good fat,” Yeboah said. Meanwhile, older models used in ad campaigns also tend to be white.
In general, the public conversation around aging and anti-aging has tended to center white people and white skin, as well. In part, that’s because of a perception that “Black women age less quickly than everybody else,” Yeboah said.
It’s true that melanin, a pigment present at higher levels in darker skin, provides some protection from sun damage and therefore from winkles. “Think of it as an umbrella,” Rahman said. It’s also true that Black communities and other communities of color have conversations and beliefs around aging and bodiesthat diverge from the negative messages handed down by mainstream media.
“There’s a certain status that is given to older people of color” within their communities, Afiya Mbilishaka, a clinical psychologist who studies the psychology of beauty, told Vox. “They were able to thrive in this society that often is focused on their demise.”
Magazines like Essence and Ebony have often celebrated the beauty of older Black celebrities, Mbilishaka said. Actors Cicely Tyson and Angela Bassetthave been especially held up as icons of beautiful aging. And “grandmothers have a very particular power status in Black families,” she added. “We really honor the aging process. We celebrate it. We want people to live a long time.”
Still, the exclusion of Black people and other people of color from mainstream conversations around aging remains problematic, Yeboah said. While the idea that Black women don’t age or don’t worry about aging might sound nice, “it’s still kind of marginalizing and cutting off a demographic of women,” she explained.
And even if older women of color are celebrated within their communities, they can face intertwined ageism and racism in mainstream media, which also shows up in society as a whole. In movies and TV, older Black women often show up either in “matronly subservient roles” as maids or nurses, or harsh disciplinarian roles like police commissioners, Yeboah said. “They’re never really given their moment to really show up for themselves and to live their best lives.”
The pandemic could push society to rethink wrinkles
While the body positivity movement provided one opportunity to challenge the stigma around wrinkles, the pandemic may offer another. After all, when lockdowns forced hair salons to close, many women missed their dye appointments and started letting their hair go gray. And while some went back as soon as they could, others decided to stick with their new silver hue. The New Yorker chronicled some of these transformations in a recent photo feature. “When I see friends whom I have known since I was thirteen, and they are gray, I think, ‘Wow, we are older,’” one woman, Sabrina Spencer, told the magazine. “But I don’t see it as negative.”
The trend could be a broader sign of changing attitudes toward visible signs of aging, including wrinkles, Applewhite said: “We’re not going to allow ourselves to be so tyrannized by them.”
Recent months have also seen a number of celebrities and other public figures speak out about embracing older skin. For example, in Face: One Square Foot of Skin, published this April, author and filmmaker (and a star of the 1980s sitcom Family Ties) Justine Bateman explores women’s relationships to their wrinkles. Bateman was inspired to write the book after she tried Googling herself and found the search autocompleted to “Justine Bateman looks old.”
“It messed with my head far more than I thought it would,” she told Vox. But the experience led her to think about larger social attitudes toward aging: “What fears do we have as a group that are acting as anchors for this idea that women’s faces are broken and need to be fixed?”
Today, her message to readers is that they can interrogate these fears rather than feeling they have to alter their appearance to please someone else. “You don’t have to go along with this idea that your face is hideous,” she said. “You have a choice.”
Others, too, have recently used their platforms to normalize wrinkles. Katie Couric, for example, posed without makeup for a March spread in People magazine, saying, “When we start seeing women as they age and appreciate the beauty that comes with that, women will stop trying to look young all the time.” Earlier this month, actress Shannen Doherty posted a makeup-free selfie on Instagram, writing, “Watching movies tonight and noticed there were few female characters I could relate to. You know, women without fillers, without Botox, without a facelift.”
“I have lived,” she added. “I love that I’ve lived and that my face reflects my life.”
Kate Winslet sent a similar message in promoting Mare of Easttown, in which she plays an unglamorous middle-aged detective. The actress initially sent a promo poster for the show back because her skin was too retouched, she told the New York Times: “I’m like ‘Guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back.’”
Her character, Mare Sheehan, is “a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from,” Winslet added. “I think we’re starved of that a bit.”
Meanwhile, makeup brand Ilia Beauty has been getting attention for featuring older women with visible wrinkles on its Instagram, either on their own or paired with their daughters.
Such moments of wrinkle visibility could be heightened by the current historical moment. Indeed, the pandemic might be changing cultural attitudes around aging and life experiences, encouraging people to celebrate the bodies that have taken them through hard times and shining a bright light on ageism across society. When Covid-19 first began spreading in America, many dismissed it as only afflicting the old and sick, a dismissal that may even have led to worse health care for elderly patients. But now, there’s a growing awareness of the role of age discrimination in the pandemic and beyond.
In March, for example, the World Health Organization launched the new Global Campaign to Combat Ageism, which “aims to change the narrative around age and ageing and help create a world for all ages.”
The pandemic “exposed the prejudice that has been all around us all along,” Applewhite said. “It brought age and aging out of the corner, out of the shadows.”
The last year has also been a time when many people reconsidered their priorities, including the time and effort they spend on their appearance. “As the stressors and anxieties of the past year mounted, many people became comfortable with long, gray hair, bushy beards, makeup- or Botox-free faces, and extra pounds,” clinical psychologist Jelena Kecmanovic wrote in the Washington Post. “For some, this went hand-in-hand with a more natural, mindful way of living.”
Some people just became less self-conscious about their looks over the last 18 months, Mbilishaka said — “because it’s a pandemic, and who cares?”
To normalize wrinkles, we have to embrace aging in general
Of course, the pandemic also forced many people to spend their workdays on Zoom, which may have encouraged them to focus on their wrinkles. “There was this constant looking at the face,” Bateman said. “When’s the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror for an hour?”
And while getting Botox or forgoing it may be a decision for some people, not everyone has the luxury of choice when it comes to taking care of their skin. Someone who does manual labor outdoors may not be able to avoid the sun, for example, Mbilishaka said. And it’s important to recognize both the “extra income involved in beauty” (Botox can cost around $300-$600 per treatment, while fillers can start at more than $650) and the free time needed for anything from getting fillers to applying under-eye cream. Going without such treatments may be empowering for some people — for others, it’s just life.
More than just eschewing certain products, a true shift in the way we see older faces may require a change in how we see older people and their roles. American society needs “to really disrupt the concept of aging,” Mbilishaka said. “Just because someone is retired or not having more children doesn’t mean that they can’t make such a meaningful contribution.”
Beauty publications should not only feature older models (including those with actual wrinkles), but also hire older writers to make sure their experiences with skin care and products are being represented, Yeboah said. “Beauty doesn’t stop when you are 40.”
And while older people aren’t responsible for ending the stigma against them, they could still have a role to play. “If older women continue to, as a group, despise their own faces, all the women that are younger than them are going to be terrified of the second half of their life,” Bateman said. But if older women are able to love themselves and their skin, “then these younger women are going to look at the older women the same way an 8-year-old looks at a tween,” she explained: “like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t wait to be 12.’”
“Wouldn’t it be more fun if we were always looking forward, going like, ‘I can’t wait to be 50. I can’t wait to be 60, 70, 80,’” Bateman said. “‘I’m going to be rad like that.’”
Hate crime laws won’t actually prevent anti-Asian hate crimes -
A Stop Asian Hate rally in Detroit on March 27, part of a nationwide protest against hate crimes directed at Asian Americans. | Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images
By centering policing, they do little to address the root cause.
The largest federal response to a surge in attacks against Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic has been Congress’s Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. The law, passed last month, designates a specific Justice Department official to focus on reviewing such incidents and provides grants to police departments so they can establish hotlines for hate crime reporting.
According to multiple experts, however, hate crime laws, like the one Congress just passed, serve a symbolic purpose but don’t really do much to deter people from committing hate crimes.
Meanwhile, lawmakers have overlooked perhaps the most important piece: prevention.
“Nobody says I’m not going to beat that person up because I’m going to get arrested for a hate crime law. What they do is send a message that this behavior is egregious,” says California State University professor Phyllis Gerstenfeld, a criminal justice expert who studies hate crimes. “It puts this official seal that this behavior is harmful for different communities.”
While experts note that such messaging is important, and gathering more information about the problem could potentially help target a response, activists are concerned that the collected data could be used to strengthen a carceral system that’s already been shown to be both ineffective and discriminatory, particularly toward Black Americans.
“The real question is what do we do with that data? Is it to reinforce a certain narrative that we need more policing?” asks Jason Wu, co-chair of the GAPIMNY-Empowering Queer & Trans Asian Pacific Islanders, one of over 85 Asian American and Pacific Islander advocacy groups that opposes Congress’s latest bill. “If the data is the call for more of the same, then it’s not going to do anything useful to preventing violence in the future.”
Actually preventing hate crimes will require addressing their root causes instead — something that’s neglected by the congressional response.
“Enhancing criminal prosecutions of and requiring greater reporting on hate crimes are interventions that take place after bias incidents have taken place,” Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke previously told Vox. “Education, public messaging — particularly from elected officials — and other community-based programs aimed at reconciliation and repair are more likely to reduce the incidents of hate crimes.”
Much of the response to anti-Asian hate crimes doesn’t address the root cause
Part of the reason many hate crime laws focus on responding to an incident, rather than attempting to target the root cause, is because it can be difficult to tackle the source of the prejudice and violent behavior — and because of how little research there is on what’s actually worked.
“It’s hard to even define the problem. What is hate? What is bias? It shifts really rapidly,” says Gerstenfeld, who notes that the people involved in these attacks often aren’t part of any type of organized hate group. “It’s hard to measure and do studies on attitude change. It’s just a really hard thing to study.”
In a 2020 Health Affairs research review that Gerstenfeld completed with several other experts, they noted repeatedly how scant the data is about the efficacy of preventive approaches that try to reduce prejudiced actions within communities. “With few exceptions such as intergroup contact, hate-motivated behavior reduction efforts are largely unproven to date,” they write.
Hate crimes, as the label suggests, are crimes motivated by biases that offenders hold about a particular group based on attributes including race, religion, and sexual orientation. Historically, they’ve been notoriously difficult to prosecute because they require proof of a person’s intent, and because laws are unevenly enforced by police.
“At the person level, it begins with biases,” says University of North Carolina Charlotte professor Robert Cramer, a public health researcher. “Hate crimes are the … worse case example of expression of these prejudices, and they can be impulsive and emotional, or well thought out.”
In the case of most hate crimes, the cause is multifaceted — and the victims are often arbitrarily picked by a perpetrator. “Most hate crimes are a random person and a crime of opportunity,” says University of Akron psychology professor Toni Bisconti. “It’s about sending a message. This person I attacked is a vessel to the community.”
There are some patterns that researchers have observed in studying such attacks: Some perpetrators have a history of bullying or anger management problems, and they then direct this vitriol at a specific group because of information they’ve consumed that exacerbates existing prejudice. In a number of instances, those committing hate crimes are dealing with other issues including substance abuse.
“Parents and schools overlook their ability to be aggressive as kids,” says Bisconti. “If that pool of aggression goes unnoticed, as adults, there’s a bombardment of paranoia out there on the internet telling your young, righteous white male that someone in the world is going to take something from him.”
Exposure to statements by politicians, media, and other sources can amplify or fuel biases people may hold and lead them to identify specific groups as a threat.
“Many are driven by group protection: I am setting a wrong right,” says Edward Dunbar, a psychologist who has studied hate crime perpetrators. Research conducted in Boston in the 1990s by social scientists Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt identified four types of hate crime offenders: those looking for a thrill, those defending what they perceived as their territory, those retaliating for a perceived offense, and those who feel like they are on a mission against a specific group. (It’s worth noting that their sample size was limited, and that this research was conducted some time ago.)
One of the toughest issues when it comes to preventing hate crimes is that it’s incredibly hard to foresee who will commit such incidents, since many aren’t part of a coordinated group and a number are completely unplanned.
“This century, you see something even more dangerous — you see more defensive hate crimes,” says Levin. “There are too many white Americans, who feel multiple threats, who feel like they are being replaced by people of color.”
Hate incidents and sentiment increased during the Trump administration as he used racist rhetoric and stoked violence toward several groups including Latino Americans, Black Americans, Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans. In an interview with NBC News, University of California Riverside political science professor Karthick Ramakrishnan noted that Trump’s racist comments about Latino Americans directly affected people’s behavior:
He said a 2020 study that examined Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants during his presidential campaign — when he referred to them as “rapists” and declared that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best” — found that the inflammatory remarks emboldened certain members of the American public and gave them license to express deeply held prejudices. Researchers dubbed this the “Trump effect” or “emboldening effect.”
In the case of anti-Asian hate incidents and crimes, experts point to a combination of discriminatory rhetoric used by leaders, including Trump, which associated Asian Americans with the spread of the coronavirus combined with deep-seated biases about Asian Americans as foreigners as some of the factors driving such attacks. Additionally, due to the pervasiveness of the misleading “model minority” myth, some see resentment toward Asian Americans, who are stereotyped as doing well in the US, as another reason for such hostility.
“The precedent was set as soon as [Trump] made that ‘China virus’ remark, that’s continued to stick. The idea of, wait, wait, wait, you’re dirty. It goes into the fear of foreigners, which is how we’ve always aggressed against Asian people,” says Bisconti.
Punitive responses don’t really address the biases that people internalize or their relationship with violence — both of which are key aspects of hate crimes. While the new congressional hate crimes law aims to include community service and education efforts as part of the penalties an offender faces, it’s still a reactive solution after failing to reach someone before they’ve committed such attacks.
“To prevent hate crimes requires something completely different. It requires not changing laws, but the thinking of people in this country,” says Levin, now a Northeastern University professor emeritus.
Experts say education and social service policies can help prevent hate crimes
So if punitive actions and sentencing don’t prevent hate crimes, what does?
There are some studies that have seen promising results for combating biases, but there’s a lot we still don’t know.
Some of the most robust research has focused on contact theory, or the idea that interaction between people of different backgrounds can reduce tensions between them. Studies have also shown that when people work together toward a common goal, such as the construction of a local park, they end up developing a better understanding of one another.
“Decades of research show that the more face-to-face, personal interactions that you have with members of other groups, not only the more positive your attitudes are towards them, the more willing you are to welcome them into your communities, the more you trust them, the more you empathize with them, the more willing you are to engage in collective action to promote their interests,” says University of Massachusetts Amherst psychology professor Linda Tropp.
Such interventions, however, are limited in scale, and also require vulnerable groups to engage with those who might aggress against them, putting them in a difficult position. They’ve also predominately been implemented in small groups within communities, versus at a broader level.
“It’s an intervention at the personal level in an effort to solve an intergroup problem,” says Bryn Mawr psychology professor Clark McCauley.
A larger response, some experts say, could include more expansive education efforts about race that begin at a young age, as well as better mental health resources in schools and beyond. This is a longer-term intervention, though it could combat people’s biases and inform them about groups they may be less personally familiar with, while also providing children with better tools to express their emotions.
Some school-level interventions have had success, including tactics that involve counseling and emotional learning among students. By improving education, and mental health services, policymakers could help combat hate crimes in a systemic way rather than using policing and punishment as the main recourse.
“We just don’t have genuine exposure. We don’t talk about race in a real sense. We certainly aren’t talking about Asian Americans. We are just talking around it,” says Bisconti. “We have gym class, why don’t we have mental health class? When you have somebody talking with you about how to handle your own emotions?”
In addition to mental health support, activists emphasize that addressing other needs people may be struggling with, whether that’s access to housing or substance abuse, could address some of the causes behind such attacks.
“If you’re in a process of trying to transform harm and create accountability, they have to be in a place where their basic needs are met,” says Turner Willman, an organizer in the Asian American advocacy group 18 Million Rising. As Rachel Ramirez and Jerusalem Demsas have explained for Vox, competition over resources in low-income neighborhoods has been a source of conflict between groups in the past, and improving access to these services could help reduce intergroup tension, along with individual well-being.
In the near term, experts say public statements by leaders and other prominent figures to condemn anti-Asian sentiment can shape societal norms and indicate to people that such violence is unacceptable. The most effective of these would come from members of groups, like Trump’s followers, who have already bought into the racist rhetoric that’s used to describe the coronavirus. Statements by other Republican leaders and influential community figures, such as religious leaders, could help, too.
“It’s really hard to predict who is going to be the perpetrator,” says Duke law professor James Coleman. “People in the community need to be speaking out against it, people seeing these actions taking action against it. It requires a community response that makes it costly for people to do this.”
Amazon’s Black employees say the company’s HR department is failing them -
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres, a botanical garden inside the Amazon office complex in Seattle, on November 13, 2018. | Ted S. Warren/AP
In interviews with Recode, dozens of Amazon employees detailed allegations of racial bias and discrimination on the job — and many of them said the company’s HR department was part of the problem.
Amazon has never been known as an easy place to work. It’s not uncommon for job candidates to ask Amazon’s recruiters about an infamous New York Times story from 2015 that reported corporate employees routinely cry at their desks. Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has famously said the company’s goal is to be the “Earth’s most customer-centric company,” and for decades that singular focus seems to have come at the expense of nearly all else. But now a growing swath of its employees say this singular focus has helped perpetuate a race problem inside Amazon — and, crucially, that attempts to address it over the years have been stymied by the company’s HR department and its leader.
Pearl Thomas, a 64-year-old Black woman and human resources business partner, is one of these employees. She worked at Amazon for less than a year before she sued the company this May for alleged racial discrimination and retaliation. Her lawsuit is one of five different suits filed in recent months from current and former Amazon employees that detail shocking allegations of racial discrimination.
The plaintiffs, who are all women of color, claim they’ve experienced both explicit racism at work — like being called the n-word by a manager — and systemic racism that they say is reflected in the company’s alleged lower promotion rates and higher termination rates for underrepresented minorities. Thomas’s suit stands out because she works for the company’s HR department — which is supposed to not only hire and fire employees but also make sure they feel safe and satisfied at work.
Thomas claims in the filing that after she reported her white male manager for calling her the n-word when he thought she had already disconnected from a video call, Amazon’s HR division investigated but ultimately dismissed her claim when it couldn’t find proof. She also alleges that shortly after she complained, the manager retaliated against her by placing her on a performance review plan. On another occasion, Thomas alleges that she and a Black coworker were told by another manager that they should watch their tone so they wouldn’t be perceived as “angry Black wom[e]n.”
“Her position in the Company’s HR organization has given her a prime vantagepoint regarding both systemic discrimination and conscious animus towards Black employees at Amazon, along with the Company’s practices regarding diversity, employee complaints, and the use of performance management to retaliate against Black and other employees who raise concerns,” Thomas’s lawyers wrote in the legal complaint.
Amazon told Recode last month that it was “conducting thorough investigations” in light of the lawsuits, but that it had “found no evidence to support the allegations.”
But many of Thomas’s colleagues across the company tell Recode they’ve had experiences similar to those mentioned in the suits. Over the past few months, Recode has interviewed more than 30 current and former Amazon employees who detailed allegations of racial bias and discrimination on the job — and many of them said the company’s HR department was part of the problem.
More than a dozen of those sources, all of whom have worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion roles inside Amazon, told Recode that they believe Amazon’s HR leader, Beth Galetti, who is white, was for years one of the main barriers to Amazon becoming an equitable workplace for employees of all races.
“Beth is actively a gatekeeper and a blocker in this work,” a former Amazon diversity employee told Recode.
Amazon spokesperson Jaci Anderson said it was unfair and biased to label Galetti as a barrier to diversity and inclusion success at the company. Anderson said that since last June, Galetti and her team have been leading discussions every two weeks with the company’s senior leadership team on new goals related to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) work, as well as how to remove impediments to progress toward the goals.
Still, diversity experts at Amazon told Recode that as long as Galetti oversees DEI work, they believe they won’t have the freedom, data, and tools they need to identify and solve issues related to racial inequity. Recode granted the sources for this story anonymity either because they feared retribution from Amazon or because company policy prohibits them, as current employees, from speaking to the press without permission.
But sources also told Recode that they believe the root of the problem goes deeper than Galetti — that she represents the company’s ethos but isn’t its inventor. They said Amazon’s corporate culture has long encouraged cutthroat competition between coworkers and that it often prioritizes defending the tech giant’s reputation above almost all else — including diversity, racial equity, and inclusion work.
Case in point: After Recode published a report in February that revealed racial disparities in Amazon performance review grades and allegations of other systemic racial issues, the company promised to investigate potential inequities and announced more ambitious diversity-focused hiring and representation goals. But Recode has learned that at the same time, there has been upheaval in Amazon’s core diversity, equity, and inclusion department and that Amazon temporarily placed an employment lawyer in charge of the team’s day-to-day work — one who had no DEI experience prior to joining the diversity team a few months earlier.
All of this has left many of the people whose work is meant to make Amazon a more equitable place feeling like they can’t do their jobs. “There’s just a sense of distress across the board for [diversity] professionals at Amazon,” a current employee told Recode.
An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement:
We work hard to make Amazon a company where employees and people of all backgrounds feel included, respected, and want to grow their careers. This starts with recruiting to ensure our teams are diverse, and is continued by the work of the hundreds of diversity, equity, and inclusion experts that make up DEI teams across Amazon. While these teams are singularly focused on building an inclusive work environment and ensuring equitable access for all, we know that true diversity, equity, and inclusion starts with every senior leader, hiring manager, and Amazon employee being part of the solution. This is why we require inclusion training for all employees and have shared our 2021 goals and progress globally, in addition to implementing mechanisms that help us gather real-time employee feedback so we can adjust as we go.
A problem that starts at the top
Galetti, the HR leader, is just one person. Sources told Recode that of course she is not the only one at fault for the race problem they believe exists at Amazon. But sources told Recode that they believe Galetti had for years failed at her job, particularly as a member of CEO Jeff Bezos’s core leadership team, to sufficiently promote and support diversity and inclusion work inside Amazon and to ensure it was an equitable workplace.
“Blame rests with Beth,” an HR employee who has worked at Amazon for more than five years, told Recode. “She’s been the architect of the people-focused projects during these years of hyper growth. If it’s not her responsibility, whose is it?”
There have been some recent shifts. Four years into her HR leadership role, Galetti began leading discussions with other members of Jeff Bezos’s leadership team every two weeks to discuss and review aggressive new diversity goals and progress for the company. This new focus for Galetti and Amazon leaders came last summer, as Amazon, like many large corporations, began making new commitments focused on Black Americans in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. But until that catalyst, sources told Recode that they believe Galetti didn’t prioritize DEI work.
A major issue with Galetti’s leadership, according to former diversity staffers, is that she seemed to downplay or resist the idea that some employees in underrepresented groups are at a natural disadvantage compared to their peers.
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Amazon’s HR leader, Beth Galetti, speaks during a Wall Street Journal event on December 10, 2019.
One source recounted a meeting between Galetti and members of Amazon’s diversity staff several years ago, during which Galetti was confronted with data showing that Black employees at Amazon hit a promotion ceiling at certain levels in the company’s corporate hierarchy. According to a person familiar with the exchange, Galetti replied: “These people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did.” Galetti’s head of diversity work at the time, a Black executive with experience at a Fortune 100 company, attempted to explain that the Black employees didn’t have metaphorical “boots” — which the source took as an allusion to the systemic racism they face in society.
Galetti’s response: “If they work here, they have boots.”
Through a spokesperson, Galetti denied making these remarks.
“The story of Beth is the story of [many] of the executives at Amazon,” a former diversity employee told Recode. “For the most part, they haven’t had to examine their privilege, so it’s counter to their worldview to think about how people may be coming in at very real disadvantages.”
Another problem, sources say, is Galetti’s work experience. Amazon originally recruited Galetti, a logistics and technology executive, from FedEx in 2013 to take on an operations role at Amazon. But then Dave Clark, Amazon’s operations chief at the time, thought she would be a fit for a human resources leadership role despite her lack of HR experience, according to a new book, Amazon Unbound, by the journalist Brad Stone, which documents the transformation of Amazon and its founder over the past decade.
In 2016, Galetti ascended to the top HR role at Amazon as senior vice president of human resources and became the only woman on Jeff Bezos’s senior leadership team. Sources say Galetti tends to focus on developing software products, such as Amazon’s daily employee survey tool called Connections. Earlier this year, Amazon’s human resources division was renamed as People Experience and Technology (PXT).
A longtime Amazon HR manager told Recode that software tools have “improved dramatically” under Galetti’s leadership. Anderson, the Amazon spokesperson, noted that the company has 1.3 million employees globally and that developing internal HR software products is crucial, including for effectively doing DEI work.
“Beth is a brilliant operations professional and engineer,” the longtime HR manager added, “but it’s not surprising that these issues would be coming up under her because these aren’t issues she prioritizes or has experience in.”
The Amazon spokesperson said it’s not uncommon for the company to put leaders in charge of an area that they don’t have prior experience in. Other tech giants like Google and Facebook have similarly employed HR leaders who don’t come from a human resources background.
The problem in this case, according to people who’ve worked in diversity roles at Amazon, is that Galetti and her deputies have gone on to hire several key DEI employees who similarly don’t have meaningful experience doing diversity work. Sources pointed out that the head of diversity efforts within Amazon Web Services was for years a white woman who had significant HR experience but no specific expertise in the field of diversity and inclusion. Multiple sources told Recode that they believe this leader didn’t understand the basics of diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
“One thing not called out is the number of white women who have senior leadership roles currently, and … have held no D&I roles before,” a former Amazon diversity employee said. “Sometimes, I know, [it’s] someone … passionate about the work. [But] that’s never enough for Black women to just be passionate about something. We are in rooms with people who are in some ways gatekeeping the work that gets done. They don’t have real experience but are seated at the table as a peer.”
And when Amazon finally hired an experienced diversity director in 2017 who’d overseen diversity work for a Fortune 100 company, she lasted less than two years in the role. (She currently runs DEI work in an entirely different division at the company — a move that the company spokesperson said was voluntary.) Multiple people described Galetti’s relationship with this director, who is a Black woman, as toxic and, at times, unprofessional. Sources who witnessed interactions between the two said that Galetti often talked over her in meetings and avoided eye contact with her. In one instance, sources say, Galetti called for a redo of internal training videos starring the diversity chief, with the HR leader saying, “I don’t want us to sound too trite.”
Some diversity employees also say it’s telling that both this diversity head and her successor had “director” titles in Amazon’s management hierarchy, and not a higher-level “vice president” label. Amazon has around 400 vice presidents at the company, but none focused on diversity work.
“She has singular authority on her own to change that,” a former Amazon diversity employee said of Galetti. Amazon leaders have told staff, and a spokesperson told Recode, that they are now searching for a VP-level executive to run diversity work at the company.
Despite all this, it was a big moment in 2017 when a group of Amazon executives and diversity staff, including Galetti, met to craft and review a memo on diversity that would be the first of its kind ever presented to Bezos. Some staffers pushed for the memo to propose that Amazon could begin inviting warehouse employees, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx compared to corporate staff, to apply for a technical training program called the Amazon Technology Academy. The program was at the time only open to corporate employees. The idea was to offer warehouse workers a way to acquire skills they might need to make a jump to white-collar work, while helping improve racial diversity among the company’s corporate staff.
Galetti made her opinion of the proposal clear.
“This isn’t McDonald’s,” the HR leader told the group, according to people familiar with the meeting discussion. “You don’t go from making fries to corporate.”
With Galetti’s veto, the suggestion was nixed.
Through a spokesperson, Galetti denied making these remarks. The spokesperson added that Galetti is now the co-executive sponsor of the Amazon Technical Academy and a supporter of other company programs to “upskill” front-line employees, including one that has promised to spend $700 million to train 100,000 Amazon employees for new in-demand jobs by 2025. The Amazon Technical Academy began in 2017 but did not start accepting warehouse employees until its second cohort in 2019. The program recently graduated 77 employees, around 40 percent of whom previously held warehouse roles, according to the spokesperson.
Upheaval on the DEI team even as Amazon commits to diversity work
More recently, Galetti’s actions — more than her words — have angered employees focused on diversity work. In late 2020, around a dozen new people transferred internally to the global diversity team. But according to sources throughout Amazon, none of these employees had any previous experience in diversity work. They were employment lawyers and other staff focused on investigations and compliance.
And when Amazon’s former head of the global diversity team, Elizabeth Nieto, left the company in early 2021, Galetti replaced her, at least on an interim basis, with a longtime vice president in charge of a large technical team focused on recruiting. But the actual day-to-day management of the diversity team shifted to one of the employment lawyers who had just a few months earlier joined the diversity organization — she had no other prior DEI experience. (Amazon has two structures for diversity work at the company. The majority of diversity employees work within different business divisions like Amazon Web Services or Amazon Studios, while a smaller group of employees work on a central global diversity team under human resources and Galetti that’s intended to work on company-wide initiatives versus division-specific ones.)
Sources told Recode that once the employment attorney took over the diversity team, she moved members of its research, analytics, and recruiting units to other divisions of the company. An internal memo announcing the restructuring said the departing employees would still be “closely tied” to the central diversity team, but the shake-up was nonetheless a shock to DEI employees across Amazon.
Then, just two days after Recode notified Amazon about the content of this story, the company announced yet another reshuffling: The employment lawyer who had been the day-to-day leader of the diversity team on an interim basis was now moving with her staff off the diversity team. With this new change, the group’s actual DEI experts would remain on the diversity team but begin reporting to a new temporary boss until a permanent vice president is hired to head up DEI work across Amazon.
Even before this latest overhaul, around two dozen members of Amazon’s central diversity team had either left the team or been pushed out over the past two years, according to sources. Today, the team has fewer than 10 employees, sources say.
“You can’t say you’re committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and then start dismantling the DEI team,” a person who has worked in a diversity role at Amazon told Recode.
This shake-up has stunned employees across the company — especially because of the timing. As they were rolling out these changes, Galetti and other Amazon leaders have been expressing how much the company cares about recruiting a more diverse set of employees and executives, while also improving the experience at Amazon for folks from underrepresented backgrounds once they get in the door.
“We are committed to fostering a culture in which inclusion is the norm for all Amazonians,” Galetti wrote in a company blog post on April 14. “I am grateful to the many employees who continue to share their experiences with me and other senior leaders. Tough feedback is always uncomfortable to hear, but their stories remind us that we have more work to do to achieve our goals. This is some of the most important work we have ever done, and we are committed to building a more inclusive and diverse Amazon for the long term.”
Galetti then listed 11 company-wide goals related to DEI work, including inspecting “any statistically significant demographic differences” in performance ratings given by managers and employee attrition, as well as the goal of retaining “employees at statistically similar rates across all demographics.” Several other goals were focused specifically on Black employees and Black executives, including doubling the number of Black executives at the director and vice president levels for the second year in a row.
But some diversity employees pointed out how recently announced goals, like inspecting performance ratings and attrition rates for racial disparities, only came after Recode published its February investigation into racial issues at the company.
“No matter how many people suffer, they always ignore it unless it appears to hurt their brand or threaten leadership,” a current diversity employee told Recode.
It is true that Amazon has been making progress in increasing representation of employees of races that are typically underrepresented in the tech industry. Amazon US corporate employees in entry-level and middle-management positions who identify as Black and Latinx grew from 5.4 percent and 6.6 percent respectively in 2019 to 7.2 percent and 7.5 percent in 2020, according to recent data the company published.
But some diversity employees pointed out that drop-offs in racial representation as you go higher in Amazon’s corporate ranks show that Amazon’s internal systems are still stacked against nonwhite and non-Asian employees.
In Amazon’s “senior leader” ranks — which are “director” level and above in the company’s hierarchy — Black and Latinx executives accounted for just 1.9 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively, in 2019. Those percentages jumped to 3.8 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively, in 2020 but still lag behind percentages of the broader population. For context, about 13.4 percent of US residents identified as Black or African American in 2019, while 18.5 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, according to the US Census Bureau.
Anderson, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company acknowledges it has more work to do but that it is making significant progress every year. And, of course, Amazon is far from alone in the technology industry in having more work to do in creating a corporate workforce that more closely resembles the racial makeup of the greater US population. Even so, some employees still don’t trust that the company will focus on the right things when it comes to DEI work.
“It feels like I’m doing window-dressing and lying for Amazon or something,” one current diversity employee said. “And I think they actually think they are doing good diversity work. But they are overly focused on recruiting. They don’t have [enough] focus internally on the employee experience, and they are not listening to their own employees.”
Amazon’s spokesperson said the company disagrees, citing new 2021 company goals like having similar retention rates for employees of all races, as well as internal programs focused on the employee experience, such as one-year mentoring initiatives focused on women from underrepresented backgrounds.
Diversity employees who spoke to Recode also said Galetti and other leaders don’t give them access to the data they say they need to identify problem areas and come up with sustainable ways to fix them. Recode previously reported that Amazon diversity employees who work outside of the HR department had confronted Galetti at an internal summit in early 2020 about the difficulty of not having access to detailed data about workforce demographics across different management levels.
Then, after Recode first presented Amazon with leaked internal data in February that seemed to show racial disparities in employee performance ratings, Amazon began further restricting access to internal demographic data, according to numerous sources. Now, many diversity employees must ask certain colleagues who have access to pull information for them, or get sign-off for access from superiors.
Anderson, the spokesperson, said the company agrees that data plays a crucial role in the work but that the specificity of access a given DEI professional has relates to their specific role. She maintained that all DEI professionals at Amazon have access to the data they need to do their job.
But several staffers focused on diversity work at the company disagree.
“For those of us with experience, we know that data tells the story and is key to focusing on the right things,” another diversity employee said. “We hope we are hitting home runs, but in most cases we are working off of anecdotes.”
When customer obsession conflicts with employee satisfaction
For all their criticisms of Galetti, current and former employees emphasized that they believe her leadership choices and priorities are a reflection of a corporate culture that’s obsessed with customer satisfaction, but that has historically been less interested in the kind of empathy for employees that’s necessary for sustained success in DEI work.
“I’d say 40 percent of the impression that [Galetti] doesn’t care about DEI comes from actions she chose,” a former Amazon diversity employee told Recode. “Sixty percent is [that] she’s a cog in the machine.”
Several of these people also assigned blame to members of Jeff Bezos’s predominantly white male leadership team, who they believe have for years been complicit in ignoring signs of racial inequity inside the company. This leadership team consists of around 25 executives — but only four are women, and three of the women are white. None of the men are Black or Latino.
“The S team [senior leadership] is so out of touch, and none of this affects them — so they can get away with not ever addressing [it],” a former Amazon diversity professional told Recode.
Anderson, Amazon’s spokesperson, defended the company’s top leaders, pointing out new biweekly meetings focused on Amazon’s DEI efforts that the majority of them have been attending since June 2020. She said there are no other initiatives that top company leaders meet so regularly to discuss.
Some employees also stressed that, increasingly, other companies are moving diversity work out of HR and giving chief diversity officers a direct line to a company’s chief executive. A recent survey of 168 chief diversity officers found that nearly 40 percent report to a company’s CEO, while just 17 percent report to the head of HR.
“DEI is emancipatory work and at times needs to challenge the company itself,” a current Amazon employee told Recode. “HR acts like the company’s bodyguard and will jump in front of a bullet to save the company even if the company itself was the one holding the gun.”
Others want to see more accountability when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
“I don’t think broadly that senior leadership wants to do the wrong thing,” an Amazon diversity employee told Recode. “But with things that are a business imperative, there are consequences. For [diversity and inclusion], that’s not the case. If you don’t meet the goal, no one is not being promoted because of that. The goals are more aspirational.”
Pradeep Gaur/Mint via Getty Images
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with Amazon India Chief Amit Agarwal at an event in New Delhi on January 16, 2020.
Sources also told Recode they believe HR is a problem for diversity work because sometimes members of the human resources department can perpetuate biases and commit microaggressions.
One source told Recode about a recent exchange surrounding a lawsuit that Charlotte Newman, a Black leader in Amazon’s Web Services division, filed against the company and two of its executives in March, alleging gender and racial discrimination, as well sexual harassment and assault. After Newman appeared on a national morning news show to discuss her experiences and lawsuit, a white HR manager commented about Newman’s appearance in an internal meeting. “She’s well-spoken; she presents so well,” the white HR leader said, according to someone familiar with the incident. The implication, it seemed to this source, was that both observations were for some reason a surprise to the HR manager.
A source told Recode that in another incident, a different white Amazon HR leader “lost her shit” when a diversity employee recommended that Asian employees could benefit from education on the idea of “allyship.” The leader raised her voice and criticized the suggestion as absurd. The recommendation came after Black and Latinx employees gave feedback to diversity staff that they experience bias from some of their South Asian and East Asian colleagues. Asian employees are, by far, the largest nonwhite racial group in Amazon’s US corporate workforce, comprising more than one-third of staff.
“Any other place, this could be a priority and something to figure out how we tackle,” the source told Recode. “We would inspect for homogeneity of teams … and say, ‘Hey, your team is predominantly X, and you have X headcount, and here is what we strongly recommend.’ Not at Amazon.”
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Andy Jassy, seen here in 2017, will take over as CEO for Jeff Bezos on July 5.
The Amazon spokesperson said the company’s records do not indicate these incidents were reported internally, but said in a statement:
Amazon works hard to foster a culture where inclusion is the norm, and these anecdotes do not reflect our values. We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment in any form, including the micro-aggressions that Black people experience all too often in their everyday lives. All employees are required to take inclusion training, and employees are encouraged to raise concerns to any member of management or through an anonymous ethics hotline with no risk of retaliation. When an incident is reported, we investigate and take proportionate action, up to and including termination. Any situation where even one of our employees is feeling excluded or unsupported is unacceptable.
Across the board, Amazon employees who work in diversity roles told Recode that the company is at an inflection point when it comes to this critical work. Several of the current Amazon employees who spoke to Recode said they decided to share their stories as a last resort.
“I want to stay,” one of them said, noting how big of an impact Amazon can have because it’s the second-largest private employer in the US and a model for many other companies, as well as a company whose products and services impact so many people.
But these same employees also reiterated a common belief: that big, uncomfortable change at Amazon often only comes as a result of press coverage or other external pressure.
“I have a group text with female colleagues and friends built over the years and we share all these articles,” one longtime HR employee said, referencing investigative stories about Amazon’s internal culture and labor practices. “Our general perspective is, ‘Thank God. We welcome the inspection in our organization.’”
Some said they were holding out hope that new Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who takes over for Jeff Bezos on July 5, might make changes if he understands how defeated diversity employees at the company currently feel, and how hard it is for them to do their jobs effectively.
Bezos himself seemed to be grappling with Amazon’s legacy as an employer when he published in April his final letter to shareholders as the company’s chief executive. In the note, which came in the wake of a historic union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, Bezos committed to Amazon becoming “Earth’s Best Employer” in addition to his original vision of Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.
Still, other diversity employees were less than optimistic. Several of Recode’s sources said they were looking for a way out of the company.
“People come into this work because they want to make a difference,” a current Amazon employee said. “You get pulled by your heartstrings, [but] then get sucked into a hostile situation.”
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