Women and the Workplace Wardrobe Police

Dress codes are an equity issue. It's time we scrap them and focus on employee outcomes.

There’s a TikTok trend where people critique women’s work outfits. Too often, it’s an overly-strident woman in HR gleefully proclaiming what is and isn’t work appropriate with a fair amount of snark and condescension. Sometimes, it’s a Gen Z professional, asking for advice or showing off what she believes is a work-appropriate outfit.

This video made the rounds on TikTok and LinkedIn. The comments from a lot of men and women were judgmental, backwards and mean-spirited.

The video made me smile. These women are confident. They look great because they’re confident. That, paired with their competence, is all that should matter.

My knee-jerk reaction to dress codes is fury.

Dress codes are an equity issue. They largely exist to shame and police women, Black people and folks in the LGBTQ community.

In the case of women, we’re taught early in life that our bodies attract men like a moth to a flame. We’re admonished to be ashamed of our bodies and told to cover ourselves lest we should attract unwanted advances from men.

Our indoctrination starts early with school dress codes. The vast majority of these are gendered with 90% of banned clothing associated with girls according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

Banned clothing items frequently include halter tops, skirts or shorts shorter than mid-thigh and yoga pants or any type of form-fitting attire. Approximately 25% of school dress codes specifically bar the exposure of cleavage, breasts or nipples; many ban visible midriffs as well. All of these are clearly aimed at girls.

The GAO report also found that 60 percent of dress codes include rules about students’ hairstyles. That disproportionately impacts Black students.

These archaic, racist, sexist and homophobic rules have mindlessly translated to the workplace. They go from being labeled as “appropriate” to white supremacy’s favorite word: “professional.”

They’re still discriminatory.

I admit, there was a time when I bought into the notion of professionalism. Like most people, I was indoctrinated. As I moved up the ladder, I became a cop for enforcing gendered workplace appearance norms.

I did this even though my own lived experience had proven repeatedly that women’s fashion choices don’t control male urges. That’s the problem with patriarchy and white supremacy; they infect everyone because that’s how the system perpetuates.

I’ll never forget my first HR dress code violation. It felt a lot like being pulled over by the cops. I was an analyst working at a start-up subsidiary of US Steel in Pittsburgh. I got called into HR for my nipples. Yep, my nipples were a big problem.

First let me say, our office was dominated by men and freezing most days. That made my nipples apparent which, apparently, offended someone — enough that they reported my non-compliant nipples to HR.