Lipstick and the Law
My vanity is home to a large collection of products ranging from dry shampoo rejects (I should probably throw out) to various hues of beauty blenders. I am a self-proclaimed “girly girl”. As a millennial, I have grown up in a generation of Youtube makeup gurus and influencers who have preached hair and skincare commandments at me since puberty. While I do not enjoy the toll this takes on my morning routine, and to be honest my sleep, I do generally enjoy wearing makeup and styling my hair for work. Although, I envy my boyfriend’s markedly shorter fifteen-minute shower to door routine.
I have never considered this laborious morning process as having any connection to my job. However, my boyfriend and I both work in law firms. He is a practicing attorney, and I am still a lowly clerk working my way through law school. While I can’t imagine anyone at my workplace saying anything if I showed up bare faced, I also can’t say I have ever tried it.
I like to imagine that my success and reputation at my workplace is attached to my work product and not the product on my face. While I certainly enjoy these girly things, the idea that my success or failure at work could be tied to a $30 bottle of foundation is disturbing.
Private airline, United Airlines, has recently come under fire for alleged discriminatory practices in the workplace. United Airlines began offering exclusive flights for athletes in sports leagues such as the NFL, MLB, and NCAA. The flights are incredibly desirable for not only the athletes but also the flight attendants employed by the airline. However, two employees are alleging that process for selecting crew members is based predominantly on looks rather than skills.
The two plaintiffs are both women, both have been with the company for over twenty years, one of which is African American. Both plaintiffs allege that they have been denied the ability to work these exclusive chartered flights and have been offered no substantive reason as to why. The only reason that has been offered is that they are not part of the “preferred” list. The plaintiffs argue that the only notable difference between themselves, and the women selected for the flight (aside from their seniority in the company), are that they are not young, blonde, white women. The obvious deduction based on these alleged circumstances is that these women are not being selected because of their superior qualifications but simply because the plaintiffs do not fit the airline’s ideal of beauty.
Unfortunately, this circumstance is not unique. This case is almost identical in fact to a landmark employment case Wilson v. Southwest Airlines Co 517 F. Supp. 292, 293 (N.D. Tex. 1981). This is the seminal case on whether gender can be a bona fide occupational qualification. In the case, male plaintiffs sued after being denied employment on the basis of gender. Southwest argued that looks, specifically female looks, were an important qualification to the job because it was important to marketing purposes and as such qualified as a bona fide occupational requirement under § 703€ of Title VII, 42 U.S.C.S. §2000e-2(e). The Court ultimately ruled that marketing purposes, based on sexual allure of women, were only tangential and did not rise to the level of a business necessity.
While controversial, hiring based on looks is not completely barred by any legislation or case law. Instead, employers may do so if there is a bona fide occupation requirement. A classic example of this would be a modeling contract where a specific look or appearance is essential to the task. If a plus-size clothing company wants to market their clothes, they are completely within their rights to hire based off the appearance of the model matching their targeted demographic. However, it begs the question if being young, blonde, and attractive is essential to the task of serving an exclusive chartered flight for professional athletes.
While the United Airlines case touches not just issues of cosmetics, but also issues around age and race, the idea central to all of these issues is some predetermined ideal of beauty. Even more concerning, is that not only is there a predetermined ideal of beauty but employers are now expecting women to obtain this ideal of beauty as a workplace requirement.
My comparison of my boyfriend’s work morning routine and mine is absolutely an oversimplification of the inequalities in the workforce, but I think it does provide a helpful illustration of the additional labor that goes into women attempting to meet societal beauty standards. It is markedly unfair to expect women to be both competent employees while also attaining arbitrary beauty standards that have distant (if any) relation to their work.