Unfortunately for them, working women do not have access to legal advice when they get dressed in the morning. But they intuit that this maze exists. Is it any surprise that, two decades into the legal evolution of the professional beauty qualification, working women are tense to the point of insanity about their appearance? Their neuroses don’t arise out of the unbalanced female mind, but are sane reactions to a deliberately manipulated catch-22 in the workplace. Legally, women don’t have a thing to wear.
Sociologists have described the effect on women of what such laws legalize. Sociologist Deborah L. Sheppard, in The Sexuality of Organization, describes her discovery that “the informal rules and guidelines about the appropriateness of appearance keep shifting, which helps explain the continuous appearance of books and magazines which tell women how to look and behave at work.” Organizational sociologists haven’t addressed the notion that they keep shifting because they’re set up to keep shifting. “Women,” Sheppard continues, “perceive themselves and other women to be confronting constantly the dualistic experience of being ‘feminine’ and ‘businesslike’ at the same time, while they do not perceive men experiencing the same contradiction.” “Businesslike yet feminine” is a favorite description of clothing sold in mail-order catalogs aimed at working women, and this elusive dualism is what triggered the strong response in the United States to a series of ads for a lingerie manufacturer that showed businesswear blowing open to reveal a lace-clad nakedness. But the words “businesslike” and “feminine,” as we saw, are each used to manipulate the other as well as the woman caught in the middle. “Women,” concludes Sheppard, “perceive themselves as being constantly vulnerable to unpredictable violations of the balance. . . . The area of appearance seems to be one where women feel they can most easily exert some control over how they will be responded to.” But “they also perceive themselves as generally needing to take responsibility for having triggered such violations.”
Women blame themselves for triggering “violations.” What violations are these? A Redbook survey found that 88 percent of their respondents had experienced sexual harassment on the job. In the United Kingdom, 86 percent of managers and 66 percent of employees had encountered it. The British civil service found that 70 percent of its respondents had experienced it. Seventeen percent of Swedish women union members had been harassed, a figure which suggests 300,000 Swedish women harassed nationwide. Women who have been harassed, it is found, feel guilty because they fear that they “possibly provoked the comments by dressing inappropriately.” Other research shows that victims of sexual harassment are rarely in a position to tell the harasser to stop.
So women dress to be businesslike yet feminine—walk the moving line, and inevitably fail: From two thirds to almost nine tenths of them experience harassment that they blame on themselves and their poor control of their appearance. Can women say, by way of their appearance at work, what they mean? No. According to The Sexuality of Organization, five studies have found that “a woman’s . . . behaviour is noticed and labelled sexual even if it is not intended as such.” Women’s friendly actions are often interpreted as sexual, especially when the “nonverbal cues are ambiguous or women wear revealing clothing.” As we saw, women’s and men’s definitions of “revealing” differ. Women’s feelings of loss of control, as they try to “speak through their clothes,” make sense.
The PBQ and the legal verdict that a woman’s clothing invites sexual harassment both depend on women not wearing uniforms in the same workplaces where men do wear them. In 1977, when women were still new in the professions, John Molloy wrote a best-seller, The Woman’s Dress for Success Book. Molloy had done thorough research and found that without recognizable professional wear, women had trouble eliciting respect and authority. A year after his test group adopted a “uniform,” the general attitude of the women’s bosses toward them had “improved dramatically,” and twice as many women were recommended for promotion. In the control group there was no change. Molloy tested the “uniform” extensively, and found that a skirted suit was “the success suit”; he recommended categorically that professional women adopt it. “Without a uniform,” he said, “there is no equality of image.” Evidently committed to women’s advances, Molloy urged women to wear the uniform in solidarity with one another; he quotes a pledge signed by corporate women that states: “I am doing this so that women may have as effective a work uniform as men and therefore be better able to compete on an equal footing.”
Molloy warned what might happen if women were to adopt professional dress: “The entire fashion industry is going to be alarmed at the prospect. . . . They will see it as a threat to their domination over women. And they will be right. If women adopt the uniform, and if they ignore the absurd, profit-motivated pronouncements of the fashion industry when they select [it], they will no longer be malleable.” He went on to predict the strategies to which the industry might resort to undermine the adoption of a professional uniform for women.
Eventually, The New York Times Magazine ran a piece declaring that Molloy’s strategy was passé, and that women were so confident now that they could abandon the suit and express their “femininity” once more. Many media for which the fashion industry provided a sizable portion of their ad budget quickly followed suit. Beauty, thinness, couture, and taste had to constitute a woman’s authority now that the professional uniform could not do it for her. Sadly for her, though, the evidence, according to Molloy, is that dressing for business success and dressing to be sexually appealing are practically mutually exclusive because a woman’s perceived sexuality can “blot out” all other characteristics. Professional women today are expected to emulate fashion models. But in Molloy’s study of one hundred male and female professionals, ninety-four chose the professionally dressed woman over the fashion model as exemplifying professional competence.
The 1980s decried Molloy’s movement on the grounds that it forced women to dress like men—though the proposed image, with its high-heeled pumps, stockings, palette of colors, makeup, and jewelry, was masculine only insofar as it established for women something recognizable as professional dress. But the fashion industry trammeled the experiment in creating businesswear for women, and they lost the instant professional status and moderate sexual camouflage that the male uniform provides. The shift in fashion ensured that the fashion industry would not suffer, while it also ensured that women would have simultaneously to work harder to be “beautiful” and work harder to be taken seriously.
Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it. A woman employer may find a well-cut European herringbone twill, wantonly draped over a tautly muscled masculine flank, madly provocative, especially since it suggests male power and status, which our culture eroticizes. But the law is unlikely to see good Savile Row tailoring her way if she tells its possessor he must service her sexually or lose his job.
If, at work, women were under no more pressure to be decorative than are their well-groomed male peers in lawyer’s pinstripe or banker’s gabardine, the pleasure of the workplace might narrow; but so would a well-tilled field of discrimination. Since women’s appearance is used to justify their sexual harassment as well as their dismissal, the statements made by women’s clothing are continually, willfully misread. Since women’s working clothes—high heels, stockings, makeup, jewelry, not to mention hair, breasts, legs, and hips—have already been appropriated as pornographic accessories, a judge can look at any younger woman and believe he is seeing a harassable trollop, just as he can look at any older woman and believe he is seeing a dismissable hag.
Emulating the male uniform is tough on women. Their urge to make traditionally masculine space less gray, sexless, and witless is an appealing wish. But their contribution did not relax the rules. Men failed to respond with whimsy, costume, or color of their own. The consequence of men wearing uniforms where women do not has simply meant that women take on the full penalties as well a
s the pleasures of physical charm in the workplace, and can legally be punished or promoted, insulted or even raped accordingly.
Women dare not yet relinquish the “advantage” this inequality in dress bestows. People put on uniforms voluntarily only when they have faith in the fair rewards of the system. They will understandably be unwilling to give up the protection of their “beauty” until they can be sure the reward system is in good working order; the professions will be unwilling to give up the controlling function of the professional beauty qualification until they are certain that women are so demoralized by it that they will pose no real threat to the way things are done. It’s an uneasy truce, each side playing for time; however, when playing for time under the beauty myth, women lose.
What about the common perception that women use their “beauty” to get ahead? In fact, sociologist Barbara A. Gutek shows that there is little evidence that women even occasionally use their sexuality to get some organizational reward. It is men, she found, who use their sexuality to get ahead: “A sizeable minority of men,” she found, “say they dress in a seductive manner at work,” versus 1 woman in 800 who said she had used sexuality for advancement. In another study, 35 percent of men versus only 15 percent of women say that they use their appearance for rewards in the workplace.
Complicity in display does exist, of course. Does that mean the women are to blame for it? I have heard Ivy League administrators, judges discussing women attorneys, scholarship panelists, and other men employed to believe in and enforce concepts of fairness speak complacently about the uses of “feminine wiles”—a euphemism for beauty deployed to the woman’s advantage. Powerful men characterize them with grudging admiration, as if “beauty’s” power were an irresistible force that stunned and immobilized distinguished men, to turn them into putty in the charmer’s hand. This attitude makes sure that women will have to keep using the things they sometimes use to try to get the things they seldom get.
The conventions of this gallantry are veils over the inscription in stone: It is the powerful who dictate the terms; adults, play-wrestling a child, enjoy letting the child feel it has won.
This point, where beauty forms the bridge between women and institutions, is what women are taught to seize upon, and is then used as proof that women themselves are finally to blame. But to make herself grasp at this straw, a woman has to suppress what she knows: that the powerful ask for women to display themselves in this way. When power toys with beauty, the request for display behavior has been choreographed before the woman has had the chance to enter the room where she will be evaluated.
This request for display behavior is unspoken. It is subtle enough so that the woman cannot point to it, credibly, as an example of harassment (to be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility). It usually leaves the toyed-with “beauty” no choice, short of a withdrawal so obvious as to give certain offense, but to play along. She may have to will her body to relax and not stiffen at an untoward compliment, or simply have to sit up straighter, letting her body be seen more clearly, or brush the hair from her eyes in a way that she knows flatters her face. Whatever it is she has to do, she knows it without being told, from the expression and body language of the powerful man in whose eyes her future lies.
When a brilliant critic and a beautiful woman (that’s my order of priorities, not necessarily those of the men who teach her) puts on black suede spike heels and a ruby mouth before asking an influential professor to be her thesis advisor, is she a slut? Or is she doing her duty to herself, in a clear-eyed appraisal of a hostile or indifferent milieu, by taking care to nourish her real gift under the protection of her incidental one? Does her hand shape the lipstick into a cupid’s bow in a gesture of free will?
She doesn’t have to do it.
That is the response the beauty myth would like a woman to have, because then the Other Woman is the enemy. Does she in fact have to do it?
The aspiring woman does not have to do it if she has a choice. She will have a choice when a plethora of faculties in her field, headed by women and endowed by generations of female magnates and robber baronesses, open their gates to her; when multinational corporations led by women clamor for the skills of young female graduates; when there are other universities, with bronze busts of the heroines of half a millennium’s classical learning; when there are other research-funding boards maintained by the deep coffers provided by the revenues of female inventors, where half the chairs are held by women scientists. She’ll have a choice when her application is evaluated blind.
Women will have the choice never to stoop, and will deserve the full censure for stooping, to consider what the demands on their “beauty” of a board of power might be, the minute they know they can count on their fair share: that 52 percent of the seats of the highest achievement are open to them. They will deserve the blame that they now get anyway only when they know that the best dream of their one life will not be forcibly compressed into an inverted pyramid, slammed up against a glass ceiling, shunted off into a stifling pink-collar ghetto, shoved back dead down a dead-end street.
The Social Consequence of the PBQ
The professional beauty qualification works smoothly to put back into employment relations the grounds for exploitation that recent equal opportunity laws have threatened. It gives employers what they need economically in a female work force by affecting women psychologically on several levels.
The PBQ reinforces the double standard. Women have always been paid less than men for equal work, and the PBQ gives that double standard a new rationale where the old rationale is illegal.
Men’s and women’s bodies are compared in a way that symbolizes to both the comparison between men’s and women’s careers. Aren’t men, too, expected to maintain a professional appearance? Certainly: They must conform to a standard that is well groomed, often uniformly clothed, and appropriate to their context. But to pretend that since men have appearance standards it means that the genders are treated equally is to ignore the fact that in hiring and promotion, men’s and women’s appearances are judged differently; and that the beauty myth reaches far beyond dress codes into a different realm. Male anchors, according to TV employer guidelines cited by law theorist Suzanne Levitt, are supposed to remember their “professional image” while female anchors are cautioned to remember “professional elegance.” The double standard for appearance is a constant reminder that men are worth more and need not try as hard.
“Wherever records have survived of the pay of working people,” writes Rosalind Miles, “women are shown either to receive less than men, or to get nothing at all.” That is still true: In 1984 in the United States, women working year-round at full-time jobs still earned an average of only $14,780—64 percent of the $23,220 that men working full-time earned. Estimates of what they now earn range from from 54 to 66 cents to the male dollar. Taking the highest figure, it is still a difference that has narrowed only 10 cents over the past twenty years. In the United Kingdom, women earn 65.7 percent of the gross weekly earnings of men. The pay difference in the United States is maintained within the same job throughout the social structure: On the average, male lawyers aged 25–34 earn $27,563, but female lawyers the same age, $20,573; retail salesmen earn $13,002 to retail saleswomen’s $7,479; male bus drivers make $15,611 and female bus drivers, $9,903; female hairdressers earn $7,603 less than male hairdressers. A barrage of imagery that makes women feel they are worth less than men, or worth only what they look like, helps keep this state of affairs going strong.
This proves again that the myth is political and not sexual: Money does the work of history more efficiently than sex. Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society. Women’s poor physical self-image today is far less a result of sexual competition than of the needs of the marketplace.
Many economists agree that women do not expect promotion and higher wages
because they have been conditioned by their work experience not to expect improvements in work status: Women, writes Sidel, “are often unsure of their intrinsic worth in the marketplace.” In the 1984–85 Yale University strike by the 85-percent-female clerical workers union, a basic issue, according to one organizer, was to get women to ask themselves, “What are we worth?” The biggest obstacle was “a basic lack of confidence.” The beauty myth generates low self-esteem for women and high profits for corporations as a result.
Beauty ideology teaches women they have little control and few options. Images of woman in the beauty myth are reductive and stereotyped. At any moment there are a limited number of recognizable “beautiful” faces. Through such limited perceptions of women, women come to see their options as limited: Women in the United States are clustered in 20 of 420 occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Seventy-five percent of American women are still employed in traditional “women’s jobs,” most of which are ill paid. Arlie Hochschild found that women are concentrated “in jobs that stress their physical attractiveness.”
With few roles in which to see themselves and be seen, fully two thirds of American women work in service or retail jobs or in local bureaucracies, jobs with low wages and little opportunity for advancement. The few roles imagined for women are cheaply compensated: Secretaries, 99 percent of whom are female, earn an average salary of $13,000; preschool teachers, 97 percent female, $14,000; bank tellers, 94 percent female, $10,500; food service workers, 75 percent female, $8,200.
Women do earn more from selling their bodies than their skills. “In this context,” writes legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon, “it is instructive to ask: What is woman’s best economic option?” She cites evidence that, in contrast to the salaries of the “respectable” women described above, the average streetwalker in Manhattan nets between $500 and $1,000 a week. Another of her studies shows that the one difference between the prostitutes in the sample group and other women from similar backgrounds is that the former earn twice as much; A third shows that fashion modeling and prostitution are the only professions in which women consistently earn more than men. One woman in four earns less than $10,000 a year even though working full-time; in 1989, Miss America earned $150,000, a $42,000 scholarship, and a $30,000 car.