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Duke Law

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

Clothing and dress

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Some Modest Proposals For Challenging Established Dress Code Jurisprudence, Jennifer Levi Jan 2007

Some Modest Proposals For Challenging Established Dress Code Jurisprudence, Jennifer Levi

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

Two well-established exceptions to the rule exist for dress codes that either (1) objectify or sexualize women1 or (2) allow for flexibility of standards for male employees' appearance but require stricter rules for women.2 A third, still-evolving exception has recently developed regarding challenges to dress codes by transgender litigants.3 Despite this recent progress, however, the classical gender-based dress code-requiring women to conform to feminine stereotypes and men to conform to masculine stereotypes-has, up to the present, been sustained by a majority of the courts time and again.4 It is, therefore, fortitious that two cases now offer insights as to why …


The Law And Economics Of Identity, Rafael Gely Jan 2007

The Law And Economics Of Identity, Rafael Gely

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

"24 Social norms, for example, have long had an important impact on gender roles in employment specifically with respect to work/family concerns.25 Moreover, one of the central conclusions of the famous Hawthorne experiments of the 1930s26 was that employee work effort is significantly influenced by the norms of the employee's workgroup with respect to what constitutes an appropriate work level or output.27 Applying this analysis, employees are deemed not "irrational" when they don't increase output in response to increased employer incentive pay; they are simply responding to workplace social norms-i.e., they don't want to be ostracized by fellow employees as …


Babes And Beefcake: Exclusive Hiring Arrangements And Sexy Dress Codes, Ann C. Mcginley Jan 2007

Babes And Beefcake: Exclusive Hiring Arrangements And Sexy Dress Codes, Ann C. Mcginley

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

Concluding that being a woman should not be a BFOQ for the job, this article addresses whether casino owners may require that women and men cocktail servers wear sexy provocative uniforms to serve cocktails in Las Vegas casinos.


Sexy Dressing Revisited: Does Target Dress Play A Part In Sexual Harassment Cases?, Theresa M. Beiner Jan 2007

Sexy Dressing Revisited: Does Target Dress Play A Part In Sexual Harassment Cases?, Theresa M. Beiner

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

Feminists have been debating what constitutes appropriate female attire since the beginning of the feminist movement in the United States. Since the early 1990s, when Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth was released, feminists, law professors, and popular culture critics have tried to understand women's dress in the present day. In spite of years of criticism of these beliefs, the bias this injects into rape trials, and even with the enactment of rape shield laws, this evidence still sneaks into rape cases. With this in mind, one would expect a similar phenomenon to occur in sexual harassment cases. As the …


Vive La Difference? A Critical Analysis Of The Justification Of Sex-Dependent Workplace Restrictions On Dress And Grooming, Patrick S. Shin Jan 2007

Vive La Difference? A Critical Analysis Of The Justification Of Sex-Dependent Workplace Restrictions On Dress And Grooming, Patrick S. Shin

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

Any answer here is bound to be controversial, but it would have to be founded on a notion that we, as a society, have reason to value and therefore preserve a state of affairs in which certain types of behaviors relating to the manner of presenting oneself to others are engaged in predominantly by members of one sex but not the other.109 To put it another way, the rationalizability of sex-dependent workplacepresentation rules must depend on the idea that, even granting that sex and gender or gender-performance can be conceptually disaggregated,110 we nevertheless have reason to maintain a state of …


Lessons From Equal Opportunity Harasser Doctrine: Challenging Sex-Specific Appearance And Dress Codes, Deborah Zalesne Jan 2007

Lessons From Equal Opportunity Harasser Doctrine: Challenging Sex-Specific Appearance And Dress Codes, Deborah Zalesne

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

Importing interpretations of Title VII developed from the equal opportunity harasser doctrine to dress code cases-which also fall under the purview of Title VII-would allow courts to focus on the sex-based underpinnings of employer dress codes that construct women as generally inferior to men and the harm that dress codes present to individuals who deviate from accepted gender norms, without requiring comparative evidence of unequal burdens to both sexes.


The Peahen’S Tale, Or Dressing Our Parts At Work, Julie A. Seaman Jan 2007

The Peahen’S Tale, Or Dressing Our Parts At Work, Julie A. Seaman

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

However, there may ultimately be no logical way to reconcile decisions that prohibit employers from requiring women to wear revealing outfits and others that permit employers to require them to wear makeup,20 or decisions that prohibit penalizing a woman for being insufficiently feminine and others that permit penalizing a man for being insufficiently masculine.21 In addition, the increasing judicial acceptance of the sex stereotyping theory of sex discrimination under Title VII is in substantial tension with recent cases that insist that sex-differentiated dress and grooming requirements that "merely"22 conform to existing social gender norms do not amount to impermissible sex …