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In 2014, Lettia McNickle showed up for her shift at Madisons New York Grill & Bar in downtown Montreal wearing cornrows. She was sent home by her manager. Her hours were cut, and she was eventually fired.

Four years later, the Quebec Human Rights Commission ruled that McNickle had been the victim of racial and gender discrimination and ordered the restaurant’s owner to pay her $14,500. When the money didn’t arrive by the commission’s deadline, her case went to the province’s Human Rights Tribunal, where the tribunal found that anti-Black racism is embedded in the collective psyche and that assumptions about “Black” hair are stereotypical and without basis—the kind of judgment never applied to white or Asian hair.

McNickel’s fight is one of the few Canadian hair discrimination cases to draw wide attention.

Unlike race, sex, or disability, hair is not named as a protected ground under any human rights code in Canada. According to an analysis from the McGill Journal of Law and Health, claimants must instead argue that hair-based treatment is a form of racial discrimination; a workaround that leaves room for employers to argue that a hairstyle, unlike skin colour, is a choice. That ambiguity makes justice difficult and costly to pursue.

Ontario’s Human Rights Commission has acknowledged the problem indirectly. Its policy and guidelines on racism and racial discrimination list clothing and grooming among the characteristics commonly racialized in Canadian society, alongside accent, name, and place of origin. In a separate inquiry into gender-specific dress codes, the commission found that some Ontario restaurants still required staff to wear their hair a certain way and warned that hairstyle preferences can be tied to race, ancestry, ethnic origin, or creed, not just sex. But neither document creates an enforceable standard the way a dedicated hair-discrimination law would.

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The 2023 CROWN Workplace Research Study, commissioned by Dove and LinkedIn and covering roughly 1,000 Black women aged 25 to 64, found that Black women’s hair is 2.5 times more likely than that of white or Hispanic women to be perceived as unprofessional. Two-thirds of respondents said they had changed their hair for a job interview, and 41 percent of those switched from curly to straight. About a quarter said they believed they had lost out on a job interview because of their hair, a figure that rose to roughly one in three among women under 34. More than one in five Black women aged 25 to 34 said they had been sent home from work over their hair.

Academic research points to the same bias operating well before anyone gets in the door. A study led by Duke University’s Ashleigh Shelby Rosette and Michigan State University’s Christy Zhou Koval, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that Black women with natural hairstyles, such as afros, twists, or braids, were rated less professional and less competent, and were recommended less often for job interviews, than Black women with straightened hair or white women with either curly or straight hair. Rosette noted that the professional benchmark for hair in many Western workplaces has historically been shaped by white beauty norms and that straightening can carry real costs, including scalp damage, without ever eliminating the underlying bias.

The United States has moved further, if unevenly, toward closing this gap. California became the first jurisdiction to pass the CROWN Act—Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair—in 2019, explicitly extending statutory race protections to hair texture and protective styles, such as braids, locs, twists, and Bantu knots. As per data from this past August, 30 U.S. states have since adopted their own versions. A federal version passed the House of Representatives twice, in 2020 and again in 2022, but stalled in the Senate both times, with some Republican senators arguing existing civil rights law already covers the issue, according to reporting by Human Resources Director Canada.

New York City has gone furthest of all, with its Commission on Human Rights issuing 2019 guidance that explicitly bans grooming policies restricting natural hair or hairstyles associated with Black people, backed by enforcement: a Manhattan hair salon was fined $70,000 that same year after a hair-discrimination investigation.

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In Canada, hair is not named as its own protected ground anywhere, leaving claimants to route hair-discrimination complaints through the broader ground of race. The McGill researchers argue this uncertainty is precisely the problem: without hair spelled out in the law, each case turns on whether a tribunal is willing to draw the connection between a hairstyle and a person’s race, a burden of proof McNickle carried for four years before winning a judgment the tribunal itself called modest.

This is the same fault line that has played out, more loudly, in the U.S. Congress. When the federal CROWN Act reached the house floor in 2022, Democratic sponsors argued explicitly that legislation was needed because courts had read existing civil rights law narrowly enough to let hair-based firings stand, according to a floor statement from then-House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler. Nearly every Republican who voted against the bill argued the opposite: that hair discrimination was already unlawful under existing statutes, making a stand-alone law duplicative, the Associated Press reported.

Canada has not had that fight in public yet. No bill naming hair as a protected characteristic has been tabled federally or provincially, but the underlying question is the same one Congress argued over: Is folding hairstyle into the general category of race sufficient, or does that ambiguity let employers reframe a braid or a loc as a “grooming standard” rather than a racial characteristic? The McGill authors favour legislating, warning that case-by-case tribunal findings put the burden on individual Black workers to prove, one complaint at a time, what a CROWN-style statute would settle once and for all. Until a Canadian legislature takes that up, the responsibility stays where it has always sat: on employees like McNickle.

SARA ABOULELA is a freelance journalist based in Ontario, Canada. With Egyptian and Sudanese roots, she is passionate about storytelling that bridges cultures and amplifies underrepresented voices, covering everything from politics and global affairs to social issues and pop culture.