The Daily Telegraph reported in March that a 32-year-old civil servant had won his sexual discrimination complaint against his employer after a new dress code required men at the company to wear ties.
The actual dress code required employees at a JobCenter office to dress in a “professional and businesslike manner” and went on to say,
For men the basic standard is to wear a collar and tie; for women to dress appropriately and to a similar standard . . . Within these rules staff are free to decide what clothes to wear.
Matthew Thompson filed a complaint with an industrial tribunal that this was sex discrimination. Thompson argued that since the dress code mentioned a specific set of clothes for men — collared shirt and tie — but did not mention any specific clothes that women had to wear, that it was discriminatory.
And the industrial tribunal agreed saying, in part,
If we were to turn the argument round and the only mandatory item of clothing had been for a woman to wear, say, a skirt, and she was disciplined for wearing some other item, would that be deemed discriminatory against her on the grounds of sex? We believe it would be.
Can’t you wait until tribunals like this are scouring through our lives looking to abolish every hint of an imbalance between the sexes?
Source:
Telling men to wear ties is sex discrimination. Sandra Laville, The Daily Telegraph (London), March 12, 2003.