'It's a very difficult line that women often need to walk': Labour research Director
In an experiment inspired by the different reactions they receive in response to their on-camera wardrobes, six Global News anchors conducted an experiment with some interesting results.
The anchors of the morning and evening news shows – men and women – took turns wearing the same outfit for a week – to test what responses from viewers they received.
Predictably, emails and messages about the women wearing the same outfit for a week flooded the station, while not a single email arrived about the male anchors.
The experiment targeted the public perception of TV personalities, but there are some bigger lessons to be taken away, says Kendra Strauss, Director of The Labour Studies Program and the SFU Morgan Centre for Labour Research at Simon Fraser University.
“I think dress is one element of what is a double standard around the ways in which women are judged on youthfulness and attractiveness, and men tend to be judged more on perceived competence,” she told HRD.
“There are ways in which those things play out in the workplace, that put pressure on women that may not be explicit, but that women internalize, around how they need to look and present in the workplace.”
Unconscious gender bias: dressing for two roles
An interesting result of the Global team’s experiment, they noted in their discussion, is that most of the comments from viewers came from other women, not from men as might have been expected. They were not mean-spirited but curious about the female anchors’ choices to wear the same outfits every day.
For Strauss, this highlights the fact that gendered expectations around professional dress is a societal issue, not purely a matter of men being sexist.
Plus, it goes beyond dress to encompass gender roles in society, which can be complicated for women navigating professional careers requiring more aggressive or “male” qualities.
“It's a very difficult line that women often need to walk, between meeting the perceived expectations of how women should be, which is often the more socially adept, the more caring workers, but also being professional,” she said. “In certain jobs, that's often associated with being kind of aggressive and a go-getter. So I think it's a very difficult balance.”
Gendered dress expectations can be even more complicated for LGBTQI+ employees who enter professional work spheres, Strauss pointed out, when non-binary or trans employees, or anyone who doesn’t clearly fit into a binary expectation of appearance, are not easily categorized.
“It's kind of like ‘Well, if you don't fit and we can't categorize you, then you're a problem’,” she said. “These are all of the different ways that gender norms play out in the workplace, in relation to dress and presentation. They may not be explicit, but they can make things really tough, both for women and for trans and gender non-conforming people.”
Gender bias isn’t just about clothes
The cost of this double standard for appearing professional is also financial, adding a whole other level of stress to what can also be a fraught scenario for women or LGBTQI+ employees, Strauss said.
The simple effect of not being able to afford the clothes that are expected at certain levels of professional employment brings an element of class into the equation, adding an extra barrier.
“It’s also about class in the sense that lower-income women, or women from lower-income backgrounds or working class backgrounds, it's not only the money that that needs to go into looking a certain way, but it's also having the kind of cultural know-how, an understanding of how one needs to look,” she said.
“It's not only about the money that you spend, it's about understanding what the class-based codes are, and it's an enormous amount of pressure on women.”
Strauss said that tackling discrimination and inequality in the workplace is complicated when concepts such as ‘performance versus potential’ are taken into account – the phenomena wherein women are assessed based on past performance, while men are assessed based on potential.
“I think in some ways that makes some of the challenges, including from an HR perspective, more complicated than they were in the days when if you worked for an airline … you had to wear a short skirt. Tackling those very explicit biases is a more straightforward kind of thing than tackling internalized, gendered perceptions of how men and women need to present in the workplace. Because they're often not explicit in the same way that dress codes are explicit.”
