“My company and our clients are quite conservative so I want my employees to fit into that conservative image. Can I require my female employees to wear dresses or skirts and men to wear suits?”
Your HR Survival Tip
In some fields, like finance and banking, employees always wore very conservative clothing. Men wore black, dark blue or dark gray suits with a white shirt and a tie that didn’t have people staring at it trying to figure out what it said about their personality. Women wore a dress near their knee or a suit that had a skirt instead of pants.
However, times have changed. I was amazed to discover two things: (1) California passed a law in 1994 giving women the right to wear pants in the workplace and (2) that it took a law. Really?
Today, when a company tries to address the issue of conservative appearance, we’re usually talking about prohibiting visible tattoos or piercings, no cleavage or butt cracks showing, and no see-through clothing. Discrimination rules also have us prohibiting pictures or sayings on T-shirts because they could be viewed as discriminatory by someone. Certain types of jewelry can be a safety issue.
Clothing and appearance in the workplace has become a discrimination issue. You can no longer identify the differences in clothing, jewelry, make-up, or hair based on gender; now you focus on unisex clothing and appearances that may be inappropriate for your company. This avoids not only gender discrimination but also gender identity discrimination.
State your employees must have a conservative appearance and even give examples of what that looks like to you… just leave off the gender language. For example, we feel a conservative appearance includes suits, knee-length dresses, pants that touch your shoes, closed-toe and closed-heel shoes, ties with muted colors and patterns, no visible tattoos, only one small earring in each ear and no other facial jewelry, and no more than two rings. This covered a lot of territory for both genders while never specifying gender.
If your business prospers by providing the appearance your clients want, it’s easiest to hire people who understand this and naturally dress that way. There are a lot of companies out there willing to hire people who don’t fit into a certain look but are great performers at work. You just have to decide how much appearance matters for your company and for the work the employee will be doing.
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