quote:

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The primary social function of appearance law is to empower employers, school officials, judges, and other authority figures to enforce the dominant expectations about appearance and to discipline deviance from the approved social norms. Generally speaking, these official appearance standards denigrate cultural and religious diversity and enforce conformity to white, heterosexual, Christian images of beauty and proper grooming. The rules and standards both exploit and repress female sexuality and punish women who depart from (largely) male-created expectations about proper female behavior and roles. Perhaps the central social function of appearance regulation is to maintain the sexual subordination of women to men.

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Karl E. Klare, Power/Dressing: Regulation of Employee Appearance, 26 N.Eng.L.Rev 1395, 1398 (1992).

I am taking a class in employment discrimination law and we discussed this passage the other day. I am wondering what people here think.

Do you have a dress code, or are you required to wear a uniform where you work? Are there underlying gender norms, or other power relationships reinforced by these requirements?

Any other thoughts?

[ 23 March 2004: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

[ 23 March 2004: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

What I mean is that sometimes hygiene may be lacking in that the hours can be long sitting on the bench grinding out appliances and crowns. We are paid on the old style piecework system. This has a culture all by itself.

If I get in the groove and rhythm of heavy, fast paced work which is: wake up, get in the car, slave away all day, go home, eat, sleep and do it all again the next day. Next thing I know, a week has gone by and I'm still wearing the same set of cloths that I had on last Monday, and haven't taken the time to shower.

I know its barbaric but I'm not half as bad as one of the other workers, who gets a hair cut and shave once every spring.
It’s like being a radio show host where we can talk to dentists on the phone but they have no idea what we look like.

The women in the lab don’t wear make up or very little if they do, nor do they have nail polish. In the piecework system it makes little difference what people wear, as work is based purely on demand, production and a level of aggressive determination.

[ 23 March 2004: Message edited by: Pimji ]

The closest I got was a market research company that insisted on no ripped jeans. Even so, I usually dressed just short of a suit; my 'office' clothes. Was I oppressing myself?

We have "dress down Fridays" where you can wear jeans and other casual clothes. I don't think they'd like it if you wore clothes with big gaping holes in them, but other than that, you can wear whatever you like.

My big problem at work is footwear. I am a perfectly healthy person who has absolutely awful feet. Every shoe pains me, with the exception of birkenstocks (I know, I know, shut up!). I have one pair of winter shoes that I can manage to wear for a full work day without them crippling me. But nothing for the summer - and birks are not considered business apparel. So yeah, that kind of sucks.

I was at a legal office recently where the support staff were all wearing casual clothes. Far from thinking, "How unprofessional!" I was rather thinking, "That looks so comfortable and down-to-earth. I wish I could dress like that every day at work."

It's comfortable.

I did have a temp job a number of years ago at a real estate agency where they called to complain to the temp agency that I needed to wear more makeup. I quit on the spot.

A friend of mine got fired from a temp job at a law firm around the same time, because she didn't wear pantyhose on a boiling hot summer day.

[ 24 March 2004: Message edited by: The Hegemo ]