Geek Feminism: On feminism and clothes

[terriko]

I'd been trying very hard to avoid answering any of the feminism and clothing questions because they didn't really interest me, but I was personally disappointed with the first post about them, and then got inspired by one of the HL Project books, so I wound up writing two essays about women's clothing, business, and geekery:

Who are you dressing for? re-evaluates a reader question, keeping in mind this quote I got from a 70's feminist business guide:

In business you are not dressing to express personal taste; you are dressing in a costume which should be designed to have an impact on your bosses and teammates

And this spawned another post regarding the question Can you dress well and be taken seriously as a woman in technology? (Which was actually part of the first post originally, but it was too long so I chopped it in half.)

Clothes are a common hot-button topic on another mailing list I frequent, and it's clear that womens' experience in this area varies wildly (which is why I was trying to avoid these questions myself). So unsurprisingly, my answer wasn't satisfying to at least one person (although I don't seem to have the stream of disgust evident on the earlier post that I didn't write, so I feel pretty decent about the whole thing).

Anyhow, what I'm getting at is that Mary sensibly put up a call for guest posts on the subject of appearance and presentation issues, because as she says, we don't really have anyone who's willing or able to write some of the posts that people seem to want. If you can help, we'd love to hear from you!

Comments

[heliumbreath]

Be careful of any fashion advice from long-ago, and most especially anything from the 1970s. There were a lot of crimes against fashion committed back then. And anything older is going to reflect out-of-date attitudes about the role of women, etc.

Company dress codes and attitudes at each employer are important too; pay attention to the written and unwritten rules at each place. Up until 1990 I worked at a place that expected me to wear a tie and suit jacket, then got dumped straight into a place that regarded that as indication of a lack of technical clue and expected programmers to wear jeans and t-shirts.

And finally, with telecommuting starting to finally take off, we could be wearing clown suits or nothing at all and still respect each other on technical clue, literacy, politeness, and whatever else comes through our written communications.

[kittenthebad.wordpress.com]

I've been thinking about clothes in the workplace a lot lately - it's tricky to dress well as a female intern in the tech sector, and we have client meetings which further complicates things... this has inspired me to write something for my blog, but I'm totally open to guest posting instead/too :-)