Dress Code Unfairness
The Dress Code Policy. Something all schools have. Dress Codes are in schools for the good of the students and the teachers. But dress codes aren’t always good for the students, especially the female students. There are almost always more rules and guidelines for the female students than there are for the male students.
Why? If a girl is showing something that shows even a little skin or maybe a bra strap, their attire is considered ‘distracting’ to boys and male teachers and they are then ‘dresscoded’. Sometimes they are even sent home! In my own opinion this is not fair to the female student body. Maybe schools don’t understand, (Or maybe they do and just don’t care), but whena girl is sent home because her attire is considered revealing, she is, by these actions, told and taught that her education is not as important as how she is dressed and that a boy’s education is much more important, so much more that they can not have girls distracting them with their ‘inappropriate’ attire. Now, I do believe that a dress code is important in some aspects. If a girl is wearing a shirt that shows her whole stomach and maybe a little bit of the underside of her breasts, that might be considered distracting to everyone, I know I would think that that was distracting.
Or maybe if a boy is wearing his pants too low and they are sagging a lot, I know I would also consider that inappropriate and distracting. But when you dresscode a girl because of a bra strap that is showing or maybe because her shirt is a little too tight, that’s just not fair. Sometimes girls get dresscoded for something that’s not even listed as inappropriate in the dress code guidelines! I have a friend who wears a corset to train her waist everyday. She needs to wear it over her clothes in order to avoid chafing her skin and causing rashes. There’s nothing in the Dress Code Policy guidelines for our school that state that she cannot wear a corset, yet she got dresscoded anyway because a few of her teachers and even some who didn’t have her as a student, reported that her wearing a corset was distracting to them and the students in their classes.
Her mom was furious that this happened and she emailed the school, asking if wearing her corset was a violation of the dress code guidelines. They said it wasn’t. She asked if it was affecting any ones attention in the class because boys (or other girls) were staring at it instead of listening. The principal asked the teachers that reported her and emailed her back saying they all responded by saying that they had not noticed any difference in attentiveness. This made her mom even more furious and the next day, she sent my friend to school dressed in a short dress with a low neckline. Said neckline was wide enough to show both bra straps.
Whenever a teacher went to try and dress code her, she handed them a note written by her mom which said: “To the teachers that are trying to dress code my daughter and to the teachers that have dresscoded my daughter for wearing her corset. That corset was not a violation of the dress code at your school. This outfit is what violations of the dress code look like. Now, every time you dress code my daughter for wearing her corset, I will send her to school looking like this to remind you what a violation of the dress code really looks like. Sincerely, ~Rebeckah ______” I think my friend’s mom was very brave to do this and I believe that if any girl is dresscoded for an unfair reason, this is what she should do.
She should remind her school what (a) real violation(s) of the dress code look like. We need to show schools that while some parts of the dress code are reasonable, some are just plain ludicrous. We need to show them that women are not objects that are distractions for men, we need to show them that we are just as important and that if a boy cannot stay focused during a class because of another student who needs to learn just as much as he does, that it is not that students fault! Thank you for reading this and if you are a school administrator, I hope you think about this at least a little bit and decide to make some chances to your school’s/district’s dress code policy.
