One of my daily internet visits is the site for the Sydney Morning Herald. If you too read the Sydney Morning Herald you know that they have a whole blogosphere dedicated to vapid crap such as Sam and the City. Sam basically just reproduces all the dating cliches in the book and gets paid for it. This entry isn’t about Sam and the City however because it seems over there at smh HQ they’ve added yet another vapid, boring blog to their arsenal of vapid boring blogs. This one is called “Beauty Beat“. As you can tell by the title it’s a blog that shares beauty tips for women. Now I don’t pass judgement on women wearing makeup and I don’t want to get involved in that whole ‘if you wear makeup your a bad feminist’ debate but the following I take issue with:
If you’ve ever wondered how make-up (or lack thereof) affects the way you’re treated in the corporate world, consider this: a study conducted by US economists Hamermesh and Biddle found that women who wear make-up earn 20 to 30 per cent higher incomes than women who do not.
A sobering stat to remember as you hit the snooze button for a third time tomorrow morning. Go on, get up and spend those extra few precious minutes slapping on some lippie - it could take you on the road to riches.
That’s right, don’t question the punishment women get for not conforming to patriarchal beauty standards, get up earlier you lazy wench. I clicked on the above article thinking there was going to be some analysis of the obvious discrimination against women who don’t wear make up but that was silly to think that wasn’t it? Of course the article wasn’t going to be about that.
The whole article seems to be straight out of the patriarchy handbook really. Here we have the rebuke for women who don’t wear makeup because goodness knows if you can’t be bothered to put gunk all over your face then who knows what else you couldn’t be bothered doing:
I recently read an article by a woman who believed that wearing make-up was a waste of time, right up until her friend pointed out her lack of ‘face’ was hurting her career. “If you don’t bother with lipstick, it makes people wonder what other details you can’t be bothered with,” the friend said. The buddy went on to recount “stories of qualified, talented women she’s known who she would never refer to clients or for business because of their appearance - long, unstyled hair, more-casual-than-professional clothes, no make-up”.
Besides the fact that she totally made up that conversation (j’accuse!), she refers to makeup the whole way through the article as her ‘face’ and how uncomfortable she would feel going to meetings without her ‘face’ on. I’m sure a lot of women feel that way and the pressure to conform is definitely present but the fact that the social policing of femininity is so high as to result in women who don’t like wearing makeup receiving 20-30 percent less of an income than women who do wear it (on top of the already lower salaries women get for simply being women) should be thought of as outrageous, a chance to expose the inner workings of the social conditioning of the patriarchal system not as a chance to rebuke women for not ‘putting their face on’ (who honestly still says that?) when they go to work.
If you have a corporate job, looking professional is part and parcel but the fact remains that women are held to a much higher standard of what this looking professional actually means. A smart looking suit isn’t enough. That women’s salaries should suffer due to a lack of mascara is a clear case of discrimination case in my opinion.
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