Close Up
Avery explores ‘sexing up
and dumbing down’ of work force
Dianne Avery will take a sabbatical this coming spring semester to continue her research on the sexual exploitation and commodification of female service workers. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
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“The law’s promise of equal opportunity in the workplace—regardless of sex—should embrace all workers, including those who can’t be or don’t want to be ‘sexed up’ on the job.”
Pick a decade, any decade. From secretaries in miniskirts in the “Mad Men”-style sixties and Southwest Airlines “hostesses” in hot pants in the “liberated” seventies, to the present-day surge of provocatively dressed young female service workers—the ubiquitous “Hooter Girl” quickly comes to mind—UB Law Professor Dianne Avery has a name for it all.
“The Great American Makeover,” she reads from the title page of one of her published scholarly articles, written in the accessible style of a former high school English teacher and professional book editor: “The Sexing Up and Dumbing Down of Women’s Work.”
For Avery, a graduate of UB Law School in 1982, a time when women students—and in particular women raising young children—were a minority, the sexual exploitation and what she calls the commodification of female workers continues. Employers cash in on service workers’ sexuality by dictating what they wear on the job.
The only difference between what happened decades ago and now is the scale and sophistication of the industry of image consultants and the uniform designers and manufacturers that deliver the corporate brand through dress codes and mass-produced uniforms. Not only is the influence of image consultants and uniform designers stronger and more comprehensive than one boss’ questionable taste, but workers also have had little success in resisting sex-based dress codes through antidiscrimination law or union grievances.
And another difference: The frontline service workers who are pressured to wear clothes that send strong sexual messages to their customers are younger and younger, often not yet out of their teens.
“It’s everywhere,” says Avery, who will take a semester-long sabbatical this spring to study the role of professional image consultants and uniform designers in creating “sexy and glamorous” uniforms and appearance rules for large corporations in the airline, hotel, restaurant and entertainment industries.
“The issue of workplace appearance, dress, grooming and dress codes has never been more important or significant,” Avery says. “What I have seen in the last decade is a return to the attempts to sexualize certain kinds of front-line service jobs and to ‘gender’ them.
“By that, I mean making certain kinds of women’s jobs or shunting women into certain kinds of work, to sex them up, to doll them up, and that’s why I call it the ‘sexing up and dumbing down’ of women’s work because that’s what it is. It’s about how beautiful you are, how thin, how attractive, how sexy. How alluring. How you sell the corporate brand. Not how competent, how smart or how capable you are of doing the job.”
The new wrinkle of these revealing uniforms reaching teenagers is especially troubling to Avery, who notes the recent rise in sexual harassment complaints brought by young workers in the fast food industry.
“The harm is in the lack of understanding of the relationship between work and gender,” she says. “It keeps these workers continually categorized in a kind of subordinate status. And I understand that it appears that the law is crashing up against the culture. But when you are dealing with an individual’s desire to choose how to appear or what kind of job she wants, it’s very complicated.
“The reality is that in these front-line service jobs where workers are dressed in uniforms or clothing that is very provocative, the employees don’t have a lot of other choices. They’re often poorly paid, contingent, part-time workers, with no health benefits and no internal career ladder.
“There is no question many teenagers think it’s great to get these retail and service jobs, which might be their first job. But the clear message is their worth as workers is sexual. There is a lack of awareness of how these retail, food-service and other front-line service jobs are really very exploitative—how the employees look sends a poor message about work and human dignity.”
For Avery, much of the imperative of her present work is an echo of common chords that have driven her scholarly agenda throughout her more than 25 years teaching labor and employment law courses at UB Law School. She has co-authored three editions of a popular casebook, “Employment Discrimination Law: Cases and Materials on Equality in the Workplace.” The latest edition—the eighth—was published this past spring by the Labor Law Group, a select group of national and international labor and employment scholars. Avery used this book in her “Employment Discrimination Law” class at UB last fall. With Catherine Fisk, Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California-Irvine, she wrote the introductory chapter to the book “Litigating the Workplace Harassment Case,” which was just published by the American Bar Association.
Building on her early experiences as a professional editor, her years of writing for legal journals have cultivated her ability to craft compelling titles and catchy phrases, and to cut through verbiage and find the essence of an issue. “I am suggesting we seriously rethink our discrimination law on workplace appearance and grooming codes before another generation of women gets sexed up and dumbed down on the job,” she writes in the conclusion of one of her published lectures. In conversation, she also has a knack for phrases, such as “’Mad Men’ redux,” that merge pop culture with the topics of her scholarly research.
“For me, there are no set answers in the law. And I love that,” she says. “I love the fact it’s constantly changing. I tell this to my students. I said it today. What is important are the questions you ask and how you try to resolve those questions to get to the answers.
“The thing about the law that is particularly interesting is it’s not just something dry about statutes. It’s about the history and the social context…It’s not just limited to some narrow little issue. For my work, I’m reading about culture and sociology, and many other fields.”
This spring semester, Avery’s sabbatical study will draw on a previous article, “Branded: Corporate Image, Sexual Stereotyping, and the New Face of Capitalism,” which she co-authored with Marion Crain, Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis.
“The designers of clothing fashions and makeup…place their stamp and their look on the faces and bodies of millions of workers in the United States who are required to wear uniforms to work,” she writes in her sabbatical proposal.
Avery also is particularly interested in how low-wage, frontline service workers can resist the phenomenon of “sexing up”—not only through antidiscrimination law, which so far has proved to be of limited use, but also through collective bargaining and grievances in unionized workplaces.
“The law’s promise of equal opportunity in the workplace—regardless of ‘sex’—should embrace all workers,” Avery says, “including those who can’t be or don’t want to be ‘sexed up’ on the job.”
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