Body modifications in the younger workforce
Tattoos are more popular, but not always accepted
Everyone and their mother seems to have a tattoo. It feels like the odd person out who has never gotten a body modification outside of single ear-piercings. However, for many students, the lingering fear of job denial on the basis of tattoos hangs heavy. It seems enough to deter many students who would otherwise get tattoos or openly display their current tattoos from doing so.
Despite being a fairly common form of self-expression, tattoos and other body modifications are still stigmatized in career fields which are highly professionalized, such as the business and health professions. At the same rate that more creative professions are becoming increasingly accepting of tattooed employees, these bureaucratic and formalized fields seem to bear down on their rules to keep tattoos out.
According to the International Journal of Research and Development, 86 percent of young professionals don’t think tattoos will reduce their chances of receiving a job. At the same time, most U.S. employers said that attire and grooming were much better indicators of whether or not someone would get a job than if they had tattoos. Older professionals also said that their tattoos made them more accessible to younger coworkers.
With this being said, a separate study done by Sage Journals found that tattooed individuals were less likely to receive a job in comparison to their non-tatted counterparts. Those with body modifications who were hired experienced more unwanted touching and were treated with less respect in customer service jobs.
Overall, it seems that younger generations are more open-minded when it comes to body modification, and, in fact, seem to encourage the expression of body modifications in certain work environments. Those professional fields which aren’t as welcoming to tattoos, such as law and business, are usually run by older individuals unwilling to loosen the grip of bureaucracy when it comes to physical appearance.
When uniformity is prioritized in the field, it seems to be prioritized for the employees in that field. When imagination and ingenuity are prioritized, employers seem to care more about how qualified a person is to do a job, not their appearance. And honestly, how capable a person is for a job should be prioritized over body modifications, with the exception of offensive and inappropriate ones.
What does all this mean to NDSU graduates? If NDSU follows the national average, then 36 percent of the student body has a tattoo. That’s 36 percent of students who are likely to run into fear or anxiety about hiring as a result of their tattoos. While many students can cover their tattoos, they shouldn’t have to.
As the current generation of NDSU graduates slowly take over the workforce, hopefully they can prioritize skill over appearance.