August 12, 2025
New research underscores the biases even AI has toward Black women in the workplace.
New research reveals the bias artificial intelligence (AI) can show toward Black women’s hairstyles, potentially creating barriers in the workplace and job-seeking journey.
Organizational psychologist and journalist Dr. Janice Gassam Asare recently conducted a study examining how AI responds to various Black hairstyles, building on her earlier research into the racism AI can display in the hiring process.
What she found was that when prompting ChatGPT’s image generator DALL-E to create four images of the same Black woman in a white button-up shirt, each with a different hairstyle (straight hair, a big afro, a short afro, and braids), the AI rated the braided style as the least intelligent.
Braids also scored lower on happiness and received more neutral emotional ratings compared to both the straight hair and big afro styles. Another key finding was that, despite the hairstyles being the only change, the AI often failed to identify the images as the same person. Using three AI image generators in total—Clarifai, Amazon Rekognition, and Claude by Anthropic—Gassam Asare found that all ranked the Black woman with straight hair as looking the most professional.
When Gassam Asare instructed DALL-E to generate a second set of four images of a white woman in her late 30s, also wearing a white button-up shirt but with shoulder-length straight hair, a short pixie cut, a bob, and long curly hair, none of the hairstyles were linked to penalties related to intelligence or negative social traits. The AI also consistently recognized her as the same person.
While the curly-haired version received slightly lower ratings than the others, Gassam Asare’s findings suggest that a white woman’s hairstyle is generally less likely to influence how AI tools assess her competence.
“As an organizational psychologist, workplace equity advocate and Black woman, I found the results of this experiment super fascinating,” she wrote. “Broken down in simple terms, here are some of the research implications.”
Based on her findings, Gassam Asare emphasized the particular challenges Black women may face in the job market as more companies rely on AI to screen candidates. For those who change their hairstyle, these systems may fail to verify their identity, potentially resulting in automatic rejections that block them from advancing in the hiring process.
In workplaces using facial recognition or facial analysis for building access or digital tools, this could lead to increased scrutiny, delayed verification, denied entry, or even lockouts from essential systems. For employers using AI-powered video analysis to evaluate applicants, Black women may be unfairly rated as less professional or less intelligent based solely on their hairstyle.
Historically, Black women have faced pressure to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards by altering their hairstyles. With AI now mirroring these long-standing societal biases, as its presence in the workplace expands, it further highlights the continued barriers and disparities Black women must navigate in their pursuit of advancement.
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