Comparing String and Enumeration

I have an enumeration in scala mapped to strings in JPA. For more comfortable coding, I defined implicit conversions between them. So I now can define value val person.role = "User", - person.role is the enumeration type "User" a String so there's the conversion. But when I try to compare these two, I always get false, because the def equals (arg0: Any) : Boolean takes Any so there's not any conversion triggered. I need some explicit conversion, but my plan was to be able to omit that, what do you think is the best practice | neatest solution here?