Sex sells. And according to Dianne Avery, a professor of law, employers are capitalizing on that age-old concept to exploit workers for corporate gain.
Avery, a scholar in employment discrimination and sexual harassment law, is taking a semester-long sabbatical from teaching to continue her research. Avery's research focuses on corporations' use of suggestive uniforms and appearance regulations to inject a dose of sexuality into work environments.
Avery will research the effects of corporate branding on low-wage service workers, which includes employees in the restaurant, airline, entertainment, and hotel industries.
"The job is defined by the uniform," said Avery, the author of The Great American Makeover: The Sexing Up and Dumbing Down of Women's Work.
Since many corporations require service workers to ditch modest clothing in favor of more revealing outfits, Avery is curious about "whether suggestive dress affects the way women think about work."
Amberly Panepinto, a licensed clinical psychologist in the Counseling Services office, says that it does.
"Being forced to dress in a provocative way really can lead people to think their value is connected to what they look like," Panepinto said. "It sometimes promotes objectification of women."
Avery said that although both men and women have been required to follow dress codes in the workplace for decades, the modern-day use of uniform designers and image consultants have made the outfitting process more comprehensive.
Workers, who are seen as "brand ambassadors," have had little success in challenging the codes' legality through discrimination and sexual harassment claims.
"Workers attempt to subvert employers' control and discipline over their bodies," Avery said. "They don't like to be in uniforms and they don't want to be told how to dress."
Aside from ditching the rulebook to express individuality, Avery said that there is a lack of awareness for just how far companies will go to sexualize their image.
"Clearly, culture is shifting," Avery said. "Some employers are concerned that their workers are dressing too casually."
The current role of the service worker as a sexual entity is both common and exploitative, according to Avery.
"One would hope that in a professional setting, one could get ahead based on their professional attributes," Avery said.
Aside from company policy, social pressure often pushes workers to dress in an overly sexual fashion, according to Avery, who thinks this expectation to dress provocatively is damaging.
In the last five to 10 years, there has been a spike in the number of claims of sexual harassment in the workplace, something Avery attributes in part to the omnipresence of sexual material in American culture.
"[Dressing suggestively] is attractive to women," Avery said. "Even teenagers think that in order to be successful, they have to be cosmetically enhanced."
Josh Cerretti, a Ph.D. candidate in global studies, believes that the over sexualization of workers "violates the sexual autonomy of workers."
"The gains [that women] collectively make are often offset by regressive gender ideology that sexualizes and domesticates women workers," Cerretti said.
Pushing women to comply with the risqué requirements of today's dress codes devalues their accomplishments and promotes "narrow ideals" about the role of females in the workforce, according to Cerretti,
Upon completion of her research, Avery expects to publish a book on the subject of industry-regulated dress. It will be an addition to the professor's extensive list of already-released scholarly articles and books on topics such as discrimination law, corporate branding, and gender stereotypes.
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Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
