Stilettos or flats?

Call us crazy, but good food, plated attractively and brought to your table by a courteous server should be the most important elements of fine dining or an enjoyable night out. Yet, high heels, lipstick, tight blouses and short skirts – the shorter the better - are often required by restaurant and bar owners for their female employees.

Different rules for dress codes often apply to women. Human rights legislation says those requirements are discriminatory. So why are we even having this discussion in 2017?

British Columbia and Ontario governments are taking steps to get rid of sexualized dress codes. In some workplaces in B.C., women are required to wear high heels on the job.

Why should women suffer debilitating pain trying to manoeuvre around crowded rooms with trays of food or drink while wearing high heels?

According to Canada’s human rights code, employers cannot discriminate against individuals based on their sex. Why is it still happening?

Attention was focused on this issue when a British woman was told her flat shoes were unacceptable at her London finance firm. The British Parliament has just debated banning mandatory workplace high heels in response to a petition from that employee who was sent home without pay. She called workplace dress codes “outdated and sexist.” Her petition gathered more than 150,000 signatures, making it eligible for debate in Parliament.

For challenging such outdated rules, a woman is often told she’d have plenty of time to rest her feet when she was unemployed.

It gets worse. The firm’s dress code also specified that female workers must wear non-opaque tights, have hair with “no visible roots,” wear “regularly re-applied” makeup - and appear in shoes with a heel between 5 and 10 cm high. It sends the message that appearance is of more value than skills or experience.

Let’s put the flat shoe on the other fallen-arch foot – such as forcing male employees to use Grecian Formula to age 50, beards can only be stubblelength, stomachs can’t protrude more than 7.5 cm outside of belt buckles, a size limit on love handles and no ties above the bellybutton. And, oh yes, no lipstick on shirt collars unless it belongs to your wife.

British lawmakers are now telling employers to stop making women wear high heels as part of corporate dress codes. Action is promised against corporate codes that apply to women but not to men.

This mindset is hard to change because many workers still feel that companies are entitled to impose dress codes, such as suits and ties for men, but perhaps mandatory high heels for women go too far.

There is some good news. That British firm which caused the current uproar has amended its policy to adopt a gender-neutral dress code and to allow female workers to wear flat shoes if they prefer.

In 2017, no one should tell a woman how she should dress. It’s time for women to put their foot down – in stilettos or flats.