I once wore high heels to work. It wasn't a fruitful experiment (chances are if you were a university graduate who wrongly believed working in London = nude LK Bennett courts you had this experience too). Thank heavens then, that in most London offices, the popularization of trainers as 'smart casual' wear means we can work in comfort (plus, I learned that my Nike Airs carried far more style cache as office wear in addition to being almost sinfully comfortable). That same day, the heels were banished to the back of the cupboard to gather dust.
Recent years have seen more conscious conversation circulating around office dress codes for women - crucially, around where the line falls between 'smart workwear guidelines' and 'plain sexist'. And while the rules have certainly become slightly fairer in many professions in the UK, the issue still affects women globally.
For instance in Japan, where group of women have this week raised a petition to protest the near-obligatory cultural rule that women must wear heels in the office. Yumi Ishikawa, the actor and freelancer spearheading the movement said, 'Today we submitted a petition calling for the introduction of laws banning employers from forcing women to wear heels as sexual discrimination or harassment,' stating that a government official, who is also a woman was 'sympathetic to our petition … and told us that this is the first time voices of this kind had reached the ministry.'
The Kutoo movement has earned it's title as a play on the #metoo hashtag which has galvanized women speaking out online about sexual harassment. It's also a play on the Japanese word Kutsuu which means pain - something that, if you have ever worn heels for a protracted length of time and ended up praying you could rip them off of your screaming metatarsal bones - you probably can identify with. The campaigners backing the movement have said Japanese employers' near-obligatory requirement forcing women to wear heels is part of a wider culture of sexism and misogyny towards women in Japan, and equate employers tacit complicity in the standard to much broader issues cultures of harassment and sexual discrimination in the office.
Since the petition was submitted, ministry officials in Japan have not offered comment. The Guardian reports that Ishikawa began engaging with the politics of women's office dress codes in Japan, writing about women's office dress codes in a tweet that subsequently went viral.
Ishikawa has said she was even made to wear heels during a previous employment at a funeral parlour (we're scratching our heads over this one too). The popularity her tweets speak volumes about the relevance of the issue for women in Japan - they have now received over 30,000 shares in support.
It's no wonder that despite being in a different timezone - the campaign is resonating worldwide (as of today - the Guardian, BBC and Telegraph alone have all reported on the petition). In 2016, A London activist Nicola Thorp set up a similar petition to Ishikawa's calling for the law to be changed so that employers couldn't force women to wear high heels to work, which received 152,000 signatures. The petition was started after Thorp was sent home without pay from her first day working at a receptionist at PwC after being told that she had to comply with a policy to wear 2in to 4in heels to work. 'I said "if you can give me a reason as to why wearing flats would impair me to do my job today, then fair enough", but they couldn't,' Thorp told the BBC. 'I think dress codes should reflect society and nowadays women can be smart and formal and wear flat shoes. Aside from the debilitating factor, it's the sexism issue. I think companies shouldn't be forcing that on their female employees.'
Meanwhile in Canada, the law was only adjusted in 2017 to do away with dress codes requiring women to wear heels to work. Whether you're happy to debut your heeled boots in the office, or - like me - shudder and immediately run for the blister plasters at the thought, it goes without saying that the decision to go flat or high should be run by personal choice, not sexist workwear policies. With the pay gap currently standing at an average 18% in favour of men, only 26 female CEO's in fortune 500 companies, the last thing that we (and women world wide) need, is for dress codes to be acting as obstacles in the office too.