Fausterella

A brief note on women and work

There’s your basic sexism, the “women are just not as good as men” type. And then there are the two very slightly less obvious sexism types, which often don’t even sound that bad: the “men and women are different but equal” type, and the “women used to be oppressed but they aren’t any more” type. (Confusingly, even though these three variations contradict each other, many sexists still cheerfully use whichever version suits their argument best at the time.)

This isn’t a long in-depth article about sexism: it’s too dauntingly huge a subject, and there’s already loads written about it. It’s just that a couple of news items, about women and work, struck me over the last few weeks.

Firstly, the one about the dress code at Harrods. A woman has claimed she was forced out of her job because she wouldn’t wear make up. That may sound unlikely, but in fact Harrods apparently has a two-page long dress code for its female employees which includes a directive to wear “Full makeup at all time: base, blusher, full eyes (not too heavy), lipstick, lip liner and gloss are worn at all time and maintained discreetly.”

This isn’t a trivial thing to demand. It’s expensive to afford that level of daily make up, it takes a while to apply it, and you need a level of skill. I for one would turn down a job that made me wear three different types of stuff on my lips, and I’ve never even been certain what base is (is it the same as foundation?). Moreover, as I saw mentioned in a discussion on this story, it’s far from being a fashionable look. And of course it doesn’t apply to the male employees. In fact, if they tried to wear something similar they’d probably find themselves dismissed too.

The second story is that Walmart has successfully avoided allegations of “a companywide discriminatory pay and promotion policy” against women because women were not seen as a suitably coherent group to bring the claim. The Guardian quotes some of Walmart’s practices: holding managers’ meetings in Hooters, referring to women workers as “Janie Qs”, paying women less than male workers in every job classification in every region. And one plaintiff was told that Walmart pays men more because “they have families to support”.

Which brings us neatly to the third story: an Italian engineering firm has recently been forced to make redundancies, and has selected only women for redundancy. Why? Well, a union official quoted the company as saying: “We are firing the women so they can stay at home and look after the children. In any case, what they bring in is a second income.”

Now this is your first and most obvious type of sexism, but the comments on the story fall more into the “different but equal” camp, and illustrate why “different but equal” strongly tends to turn into “different and not really equal at all”. (Do I even need to mention the many racism-based examples of this? No? Good.)

Two comments from the Guardian story about the Italian firm:

- Don’t get me wrong of course men and women are equal, but the idea of the man bringing home the bacon and the women taking care of the kids and the home seems natural to me.

- I believe in equal pay for equal work, but the mother is the ONLY person able to rear the child properly.

So there we go. We can have blatant sexism or we can have pretend equality that isn’t. Still, at least if anyone tries Sexism Trope No 3 – denial – they can be pointed at these stories and it might keep them quiet for a minute or two.