school dress codes are sexist essay

The Sexism of School Dress Codes

These policies can perpetuate discrimination against female students, as well as LGBT students.

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Maggie Sunseri was a middle-school student in Versailles, Kentucky, when she first noticed a major difference in the way her school’s dress code treated males and females. Girls were disciplined disproportionately, she says, a trend she’s seen continue over the years. At first Sunseri simply found this disparity unfair, but upon realizing administrators’ troubling rationale behind the dress code—that certain articles of girls’ attire should be prohibited because they “distract” boys—she decided to take action.

“I’ve never seen a boy called out for his attire even though they also break the rules,” says Sunseri, who last summer produced S hame: A Documentary on School Dress Code , a film featuring interviews with dozens of her classmates and her school principal, that explores the negative impact biased rules can have on girls’ confidence and sense of self. The documentary now has tens of thousands of YouTube views, while a post about the dress-code policy at her high school—Woodford County High—has been circulated more than 45,000 times on the Internet.

Although dress codes have long been a subject of contention, the growth of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, along with a resurgence of student activism , has prompted a major uptick in protests against attire rules, including popular campaigns similar to the one championed by Sunseri. Conflict over these policies has also spawned hundreds of Change.org petitions and numerous school walkouts. Many of these protests have criticized the dress codes as sexist in that they unfairly target girls by body-shaming and blaming them for promoting sexual harassment. Documented cases show female students being chastised by school officials, sent home, or barred from attending events like prom.

Meanwhile, gender non-conforming and transgender students have also clashed with such policies on the grounds that they rigidly dictate how kids express their identities. Transgender students have been sent home for wearing clothing different than what’s expected of their legal sex, while others have been excluded from yearbooks. Male students, using traditionally female accessories that fell within the bounds of standard dress code rules, and vice versa, have been nonetheless disciplined for their fashion choices. These cases are prompting their own backlash.

Dress codes—given the power they entrust school authorities to regulate student identity—can, according to students, ultimately establish discriminatory standards as the norm. The prevalence and convergence of today’s protests suggest that schools not only need to update their policies—they also have to recognize and address the latent biases that go into creating them.

At Woodford County High, the dress code bans skirts and shorts that fall higher than the knee and shirts that extend below the collarbone. Recently , a photo of a female student at the school who was sent home after wearing a seemingly appropriate outfit that nonetheless showed collarbone—went viral on Reddit and Twitter.

Posted by Stacie Dunn on Thursday, August 13, 2015

The restrictions and severity of dress codes vary widely across states, 22 of which have some form of law granting local districts the power to establish these rules, according to the Education Commission of the States. In the U.S., over half of public schools have a dress code, which frequently outline gender-specific policies. Some administrators see these distinctions as necessary because of the different ways in which girls and boys dress. In many cases, however, female-specific policies account for a disproportionate number of the attire rules included in school handbooks. Certain parts of ​ Arkansas’s statewide dress code, for example, exclusively applies to females. * Passed in 2011, the law “requires districts to prohibit the wearing of clothing that exposes underwear, buttocks, or the breast of a female student.” (The provision prohibiting exposure of the "underwear and buttocks" applies to all students.)

Depending on administrators and school boards, some places are more relaxed, while others take a hard line. Policies also tend to fluctuate, according to the University of Maryland American-studies professor and fashion historian Jo Paoletti, who described dress-code adaptations as very “reactionary” to whatever happens to be popular at the time—whether it’s white go-go boots or yoga pants. Jere Hochman, the superintendent of New York’s Bedford Central School District echoes Paoletti in explaining that officials revisit his district’s policy, which has been in place “for years and years and years,” “on an informal basis.” “It’s likely an annual conversation, he notes, “based on the times and what’s changed and fads.”

While research on dress codes remains inconclusive regarding the correlation between their implementation with students’ academic outcomes, many educators agree that they can serve an important purpose: helping insure a safe and comfortable learning environment, banning T-shirts with offensive racial epithets, for example. When students break the rules by wearing something deemed inappropriate, administrators must, of course, enforce school policies.

The process of defining what’s considered “offensive” and “inappropriate,” however, can get quite murky. Schools may promote prejudiced policies, even if those biases are unintentional. For students who attend schools with particularly harsh rules like that at Woodford, one of the key concerns is the implication that women should be hypercognizant about their physical identity and how the world responds to it. “The dress code makes girls feel self-conscious, ashamed, and uncomfortable in their own bodies,” says Sunseri.

Yet Sunseri emphasizes that this isn’t where she and other students take the most issue. “It's not really the formal dress code by itself that is so discriminatory, it’s the message behind the dress code,” she says, “My principal constantly says that the main reason for [it] is to create a ‘distraction-free learning zone’ for our male counterparts.” Woodford County is one of many districts across the country to justify female-specific rules with that logic, and effectively, to place the onus on girls to prevent inappropriate reactions from their male classmates. (Woodford County High has not responded to multiple requests for comment.)

“To me, that’s not a girl’s problem, that’s a guy’s problem,” says Anna Huffman, who recently graduated from Western Alamance High School in Elon, North Carolina, and helped organize a protest involving hundreds of participants. Further north, a group of high-school girls from South Orange, New Jersey, similarly launched a campaign last fall, #IAmMoreThanADistraction , which exploded into a trending topic on Twitter and gleaned thousands of responses from girls sharing their own experiences.

Educators and sociologists, too, have argued that dress codes grounded in such logic amplify a broader societal expectation: that women are the ones who need to protect themselves from unwanted attention and that those wearing what could be considered sexy clothing are “asking for” a response. “Often they report hearing phrases like, ‘boys will be boys,’ from teachers,” says Laura Bates, a co-founder of The Everyday Sexism Project . “There’s a real culture being built up through some of these dress codes where girls are receiving very clear messages that male behavior, male entitlement to your body in public space is socially acceptable, but you will be punished.”

“These are not girls who are battling for the right to come to school in their bikinis—it’s a principle,” she says.

There’s also the disruption and humiliation that enforcing the attire rules can pose during school. Frequently, students are openly called out in the middle of class, told to leave and change, and sometimes, to go home and find a more appropriate outfit. In some instances, girls must wear brightly colored shirts that can exacerbate the embarrassment, emblazoned with words like, “Dress Code Violator. ” Some students contend this is a bigger detractor from learning than the allegedly disruptive outfit was in the first place. “That’s crazy that they’re caring more about two more inches of a girl’s thigh being shown than them being in class,” says Huffman. These interruptions can also be detrimental to peers given the time taken out from learning in order for teachers to address the issue, as Barbara Cruz, author of School Dress Codes: A Pro/Con Issue , points out .

Dress-code battles can also take place at events outside of the classroom, such as prom. At Cierra Gregersen’s homecoming dance at Bingham High School in South Jordan, Utah, administrators asked female students to sit against the wall, touch their toes, and lift their arms to determine whether their outfits were appropriate. “Girls were outside the dance crying hysterically,” says Gregersen, commenting on the public nature of the inspections and the lack of clarity around the policy. “We should not have to be treated like sexual objects because that was what it felt like.” The incident prompted Gregersen to create a popular Change.org petition and stage a walkout with more than 100 classmates, but she says she never heard back from administration. (Bingham High School has not responded to multiple requests for comment.)

Every year, Strawberry Crest High School in Dover, Florida, holds a Spirit Week right around Halloween, during which students wear outfits in accordance with each day’s theme. One of the themes last year was Throwback Thursday, enabling students to dress up in ways reminiscent of a previous decade. Peter Finucane-Terlop, a junior at the time who identifies as gay, decided to come to school in drag as a 1950s housewife.

Wearing a knee-length, baby-blue strapless dress, a button-up on top, a wig, and some make-up, Finucane-Terlop’s outfit, he says, wasn’t only accepted by his peers—it also complied with all the school’s dress-code rules: His shoulders and chest were covered, and his dress was an appropriate length.

But sometimes the ways that schools regulate attire have little to do with explicit policies. According to Finucane-Terlop, a school official commented on his outfit in the middle of the courtyard during lunch that day. Finucane-Terlop recalls him saying, “Why are you dressed like that?” and “You shouldn’t do that. You’re a boy—dress like it. What if little kids saw you?”

Finucane-Terlop says he mentioned the incident to his school counselor right after it took place but didn’t end up getting a response from administrators. April Langston, Finucane-Terlop’s counselor, and David Brown, his principal at Strawberry Crest, however, do not recall talking about or hearing of such an incident.

Beyond this specific case, Emily Greytak, the research director at GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network), says the organization has noticed that incidents like the one Finucane-Terlop described are becoming more frequent, when LGBT students are discriminated against either verbally, or via disciplinary action, for clothing choices that don’t fall in line with either a dress code or dress expectations that starkly demarcate different rules based on gender. According to a recent GLSEN study , 19 percent of LGBT students were prevented from wearing clothes that were thought to be from another gender and that number was even higher for transgender students, nearly 32 percent of whom have been prevented from wearing clothes that differed from those designated for their legal sex.

“This isn’t occasional; this isn’t just some students. This is something that happens quite regularly,” Greytak says. The discipline is sometimes informed by teachers’ personal biases while in other cases, school policies discriminate against transgender or gender non-conforming students expressions of their gender identity.

As Emery Vela, a sophomore, demonstrates, eventually some students manage to navigate and help reform the policies. Vela, a transgender student who attends a charter school in Denver, Colorado, dealt with this issue when looking for footwear to match his uniform in middle school, which had different requirements for boys and girls and suspended students if they broke the rule. Despite some initial pushback, the school adjusted the policy after he spoke with administrators.

“While they’re trying to achieve this goal of having a learning environment that supports learning, it’s really disadvantaging transgender and gender non-conforming students when they have to wear something that doesn’t match their identity,” Vela says.

Dress codes trace back to the 1920s and ‘30s, and conflicts over the rules have been around ever since, says Paoletti, the fashion historian: “Dress has been an issue in public schools as long as teenagers have been interested in fashion.” Several cases, including Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District in 1969, in which students alleged that wearing black armbands at school to protest the Vietnam War constituted free speech, have even gone all the way up to the Supreme Court.

The subjectivity inherent to many of these judgment calls—like the dress-code cases contending that boys with long hair would be society’s downfall—is often what ignites conflict. As with the kinds of protests staged by Sunseri and Huffman, many of the larger movements to resist school attire regulations today echo a broader momentum for women’s rights, pushing back against existing attitudes and practices. “We’ve seen a real resurgence in the popularity of feminism and feminist activism, particularly among young people and particularly in an international sense, facilitated by social media,” says Bates, who sees dress code protests as one key everyday impact of such trends. “I think that one of the striking elements of this new wave of activism is a sense of our entitlement and our courage to tackle the forms of sexism that are very subtle, that previously it was very difficult to stand up to, because you would be accused of overreacting, of making a fuss out of nothing.”

Similarly, Greytak says these conflicts are also an indicator that LGBT students are feeling safer in their school environments and able to criticize them: “It’s very possible that we are hearing more and seeing more about these cases because before less students would even feel comfortable being and expressing themselves.”

As this issue has gained exposure and traction, students have also derived inspiration from the actions of their peers, including Sunseri, who’s now in the process of negotiating changes to the dress code with her school administration, “If high-schoolers across the country were standing up for what they believed was right, why shouldn’t I?”

According to students, the best solutions for remedying these issues entail more inclusive policymaking and raising awareness about the subject. And students and administrators tend to agree that schools should involve students early on in the rule-creation process to prevent conflicts from popping up. By developing a system like this, they have a stake in the decision and are significantly more likely to both adhere and respect the final verdict.

This also helps reduce some of the subjectivity that shapes the rules and acknowledges how touchy the topic can be for all stakeholders. “It’s sensitive for the students, it’s sensitive for the parents, it’s sensitive for the teachers,” says Matt Montgomery, the superintendent of Revere Local Schools in Richfield, Ohio. “You’re in a tough position when you’re a principal evaluating the fashion sense of a 15- or 16-year-old female. Principals are doing things like engaging female counselors and other staff members to make sure that everything is okay.”

Similarly, when conflicts do arise, maintaining an open dialogue is critical. “I always tell administrators to not be on the defensive, to hear students out, to hear families out, and then to have a well-reasoned explanation and if at all possible, to look at some of the research and be able to cite some of that,” says Cruz, the author. “Most of the time, school administrators are basing their decisions more on anecdotal evidence rather than empirical research. They need to be able to explain their rationale.”

Huffman, too, highlighted the importance of student involvement.“Adults aren’t going to be shopping at American Eagle or Forever 21,” she says, “They don’t know that it’s not even possible to buy a dress that goes to your knees.” Like Huffman, Kate Brown, a senior at Montclair High School, in Montclair, New Jersey, met with school administrators after organizing a protest, helping secure many of the policy changes her campaign had sought: removing words like “distracting.”

After all, teachers and administration don’t always realize that their policies are offensive—and this is where more education comes in. “Even for a lot of teachers in 2015, they have never had a trans student or a gender-nonconforming student where they’ve had to deal with this,” Finucane-Terlop says. “It’s new to them, so I understand that they might not know how to react.”

Ultimately, such rules could be the wrong way to handle some of the issues that they purport to cover. Since so many have previously been used to address the potential of sexual harassment in schools regarding male students paying inappropriate attention to female students, it’s clear other practices, like courses on respect and harassment, may be needed to fill this gap. These initiatives would shift the focus of school policies. “Is it possible that we can educate our boys to not be ‘distracted’ by their peers and not engage in misogyny and objectification of women's bodies?” asks Riddhi Sandil, a psychologist and co-founder of the Sexuality, Women and Gender Project at Teachers College at Columbia University.

“ I think we live in a culture that’s so used to looking at issues of harassment and assault through the wrong end of the telescope,” Bates says, “that it would be really refreshing to see somebody turn it around and focus on the kind of behavior that is directed at girls rather than to police girls’ own clothing.”

There’s a growing interest in making dress codes as gender-neutral as possible as a means of reducing sexism and LGBT discrimination. But even beyond policy changes, students say there needs to be a fundamental shift in admitting that teachers and administrators come in with their own set of biases, which they may bring to creating and enforcing school rules. “I feel like there’s this misconception … that you can separate your prejudice from your profession, because so often prejudice is unconscious,” says Vela. “The biggest piece of advice I can offer is to recognize that.”

In order to combat latent prejudices, schools must first acknowledge that they exist.

* This article previously stated that Arkansas's entire statewide dress code exclusively applies to females. We regret the error.

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Student Opinion

Is Your School’s Dress Code Biased?

Do students of certain genders, races, cultures or body types seem to be reprimanded more often than others?

By Natalie Proulx

Does your school have a dress code? What are its rules? Do you think those rules are applied equally to all students? Why or why not?

In “ When Breaking the Dress Code Depends on Skin Color, and if You’re Skinny ,” Ginia Bellafante writes about a law that seeks to pressure schools to undo bias in the enforcement of dress codes across New York City public schools:

In June, a group of current and former New York City public school students arrived at a City Council hearing to speak out on the indignities of getting “dress-coded.” The term had evolved to refer to running afoul of apparatchiks who did not like what you were wearing, although rules about what counted as problematic were not always obvious, and enforcement of them could seem random and riddled with bias. Accompanying the girls was an educator named Alaina Daniels, who introduced herself as a “white, queer, neurodivergent, nonbinary trans woman” with 12 years of experience teaching everything from robotics to activism. She had also worked as a “lunch lady” and an adviser to eighth graders. In that capacity, she explained to the Council’s Education Committee, she saw “marginalized students and teachers being policed by dress codes in ways that privileged communities are not judged.” Black, brown, queer and “fat” students, she said, were often upset because they had been punished for wearing tank tops or cropped tops, while their “skinny, white, cis peers” were left alone. On too many occasions, children were made to feel as if they had the “wrong” body. Consequences of being dress-coded could range from a forced change into a grubby, oversize school T-shirt to being pulled out of class to maybe even missing the prom. In a written testimony, one student talked about getting dress-coded so many times that she was left needlessly anxious, adding that the disciplinary response seemed “to depend on the enforcing teacher or staff member’s mood that day.” Another student pointed out that she had seen a boy get reprimanded only once: when he took off his shirt in the lunchroom. The group had shown up to support proposed legislation that would both require schools to make their clothing policies clear to students and parents — posting the rules on their websites — and, more meaningfully, to collect data on dress-code violations and penalties, broken down by month, week, student race and gender. The Council, which passed the law in July, is not empowered to mandate a universal dress code, but it could compel teachers and administrators toward greater self-scrutiny and accountability.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

Have you ever been “dress-coded”? If so, what did that experience feel like? Do you think it was deserved?

Do you believe your school’s dress code is biased? That is, do students of certain genders, races, cultures or body types seem to be reprimanded more often than others?

Have you or other students at your school ever pushed back against the dress code? If so, why? How did it go? Were any changes made?

If you do see bias in your school’s dress code, what do you think the administration should do to make the rules — and the enforcement of them — more fair and equitable?

According to the article, one solution that has been proposed over the years is mandatory uniforms. What do you think about that? Could uniforms help solve the problems with dress codes? If your school requires uniforms, do you find them helpful and effective?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

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Dress Codes: A Racist, Sexist History and Why They Must be Changed

By Adam Shelburn, High School Junior • IDRA Newsletter • September 2022 •

When students try to stand up against these sets of rules, we are told they are in place to “promote school safety, promote discipline, and enhance the learning environment for all students and staff.”

In reality, school dress codes are a way for a school administration to legally be racist and sexist to students.

Many schools prevent gender expression among students by adding gendered rules into the policies, like policies that state that girls must wear dresses for formal occasions and boys must wear button-down shirts. This gendering causes mental health issues among transgender and gender non-conforming students (Hartnett, 2022).

Additionally, these policies promote gendered stereotypes and, by association, perpetuate sexist ideologies that sustain rape culture (Serena, 2018). This protects the assaulter by using what a student is wearing as an excuse for someone else’s actions against them. Policies that promote gendered stereotypes and sexist ideologies allow blatant sizeism and body shaming of students.

These policies also target students of color. Bringing gender into how students can wear their hair, for example, affects students by preventing them from taking part in certain cultural and familial traditions (Salam, 2021). Native American students are forced to cut their hair short and go against their cultural and familial values (Indian Traders, 2020). Black students are forced to cut off braids or twists in their hair, cutting these students off from their culture dating back over 5,000 years (Allen, 2022).

School dress codes are a way for a school administration to legally be racist and sexist to students.

I am not saying we should remove dress codes from schools. Dress codes can be in place so that students and faculty feel safe. What we need is for districts to see how problematic the current dress codes are and change them to create a better and safer learning environment.

Evanston Township High school in Illinois has put in place policies that allow students to express themselves and create a safer and more equitable learning environment (Marfice, 2017). These new policies allow students to wear what they want as long as: clothing does not depict drugs, violence and other illegal activities; clothing does not contain any hate speech; and clothing covers buttocks, genitals, breasts and nipples.

These new policies promote support for students’ mental, physical and emotional health. Other school districts should do the same. To start, they should review their policies to remove all gendered regulations and terminology that reinforce stereotypes on students (Leung, 2017). Districts and schools can rewrite consequences for breaking dress codes and have actions in place so that students are not targeted.

The simplest thing that districts and schools can do, though, is just to listen to their students. Most of us will just tell you what we need from them to create a more equitable and safe learning environment for all.

Allen, M. (July 14, 2022). The Fascinating History of Braids You Never Knew About. Byrdie

Hartnett, H. (January 11, 2022). School Dress Codes Perpetuate Sexism, Racism, and Transphobia. Planned Parenthood.

Salam, E. (May 15, 2021). Black U.S. high school student forced to cut hair during softball game. The Guardian.

Indian Traders. (September 15, 2020). Why Do Native Americans Wear Their Hair Long? webpage.

Latham Sikes, C. (February 2020). Racial and Gender Disparities in Dress Code Discipline Point to Need for New Approaches in Schools. IDRA Newsletter.

Serena. (January 24, 2018). How dress codes reinforce systemic violence . Anti-Violence Project.

Marfice, C. (August 25, 2017). All Schools Should Look At This Dress Code That Finally Gets It Right . Scary Mommy.

Leung, C. (April 11, 2017). T he dress code is unfair and vague. Here’s how to improve it . The Lowell.

Zhou, L. (October 20, 2015). The Sexism of School Dress Codes. The Atlantic.

A high school junior, Adam Shelburn is a member of IDRA’s 2022 Youth Advisory Board from Mansfield, Texas.

[©2022, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of the IDRA Newsletter by the Intercultural Development Research Association. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]

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School Dress Codes Aren’t Fair to Everyone, Federal Study Finds

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A North Carolina principal suspended a high school girl for 10 days and banned her from attending graduation and any senior activities because she wore a slightly off-shoulder top to school. An assistant principal in Texas drew on a Black boy’s head in permanent marker to cover up a shaved design in his hair. And a transgender girl in Texas was told not to return to school until she followed the school’s dress code guidelines for boys .

These are only three examples across the country over the past few years demonstrating how school dress codes disproportionately target girls, Black students, and LGBTQ students.

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that not only are school dress codes not equitable, but districts that enforce them strictly also predominantly enroll students of color. The findings come as schools increasingly clash with parents, students, and civil rights advocates over disciplinary procedures used to regulate what students can—and cannot—wear to school.

The report also calls on the U.S. Department of Education to develop resources and guidance to help schools create fairer policies and more equitable ways of enforcing them—particularly when it comes to disciplinary actions that cause students to miss out on learning time.

GAO researchers analyzed dress codes from 236 public school districts (there are more than 13,000 districts) and conducted interviews in three of them from August 2021 to October 2022.

Alyssa Pavlakis, a school administrator from Illinois who has studied school dress codes, said the findings were not a surprise. “It does not shock me that the reports are showing that these school dress codes are disproportionately affecting black and brown students,” she said, “because our schools were built on systems that were supposed to be predominantly for white people.”

Pavlakis’s research , published in 2018 with Rachel Roegman, concluded that school dress codes often sexualize girls, particularly Black girls, and effectively criminalize boys of color as their detentions and school suspensions mount.

What dress codes prohibit and who is impacted

Ninety-three percent of school districts have dress codes or policies on what students wear to school. School and district administrators said the policies promote safety and security for students. Prohibitions against hats or scarves, for instance, allow educators identify who is a student and who is not.

More than 90 percent of those dress codes, however, prohibit clothing typically associated with girls, commonly banning clothing items such as “halter or strapless tops,” “skirts or shorts shorter than mid-thigh,” and “yoga pants or any type of skin tight attire,” the report says.

Many of those policies, for example, prohibit clothing that exposes a student’s midriff. About a quarter of them specifically bar the exposure of “cleavage,” “breasts,” or “nipples,” which are aimed at female students.

Almost 69 percent prohibit items typically associated with boys, such as “muscle tees” and “sagging pants.”

“My girls definitely feel anger towards the school for not educating the boys and making [the girls] aware every day what they wear can be a distraction to the boys,” the report quotes an unnamed parent in one district as saying. Some parents told researchers the policies promote consistency with values their children learn at home.

Other policies fall heavily on students from racial or cultural groups that have traditionally been in the minority, according to the report. More than 80 percent of districts, for example, ban head coverings such as hats, hoodies, bandanas, and scarves, but only one-third of these dress codes specify that they allow religious exemptions, and a few include cultural or medical exemptions. Fifty-nine percent also contain rules about students’ hair, hairstyles, and hair coverings, which may disproportionately impact Black students, according to researchers and the district officials that GAO staff interviewed.

For example, 44 percent of districts with dress codes ban hair wraps, with some specifically naming durags, which are popular among African Americans for protecting curls or kinky hair, or other styles of hair wraps.

The report also cites dress codes with rules specific to natural, textured hair, which disproportionately affect Black students. For example, one district prohibited hair with “excessive curls” and another stated that “hair may be no deeper than two inches when measured from the scalp,” according to the report.

Pavlakis said while the report did not contain details about how dress codes affect transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary students, it’s an important aspect of their inequitable nature.

How districts enforce dress codes

About 60 percent of dress codes make staff members measure students’ bodies and clothing to check adherence to codes—which may involve adults touching students. An estimated 93 percent of dress codes also contain rules with subjective language that leave decisions about dress code compliance open to interpretation, the report says. The interpretations often target LGBTQ and Black students, according to experts quoted in the GAO report.

Schools that enroll predominantly students of color are more likely to enforce strict dress codes, and also more likely to remove students from class for violating them. This is particularly concerning because more than 81 percent of predominantly Black schools (where Black students make up more than 75 percent of the population) and nearly 63 of predominantly Hispanic schools enforce a strict dress code, compared to about 35 percent of predominantly white schools.

“When we take away that instructional time because they’re wearing leggings, we are doing our students a disservice,” Pavlakis said. “And at the end of the day, we’re doing our black and brown students a bigger disservice than anyone else.”

The report also found that schools with a larger number of economically disadvantaged students are more likely to enforce strict dress codes. Dress codes can be challenging for low-income families to adhere to, especially if they’re required to buy specific clothing items, such as uniforms, or can only allow their children to have hairstyles approved by schools, experts quoted in the report said.

Finally, schools that enforce strict dress codes are associated with statistically significant, higher rates of exclusionary discipline—that is, punishments that remove students from the classroom, such as in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions.

That means students of color and poor students—most specifically, Black girls—are most likely to face consequences for violating school dress codes, causing them to miss class time. The more class they miss, the more likely it is that they will fall behind in school.

While dress code violations do not often result directly in exclusionary discipline such as suspensions and expulsions, an estimated 44 percent of dress codes outlined “informal” removal policies, such as taking a student out of class without documenting it as a suspension.

Districts also commonly list some consequences for violations of their dress code policies, such as requiring students to change clothes, imposing detention, and calling parents or guardians.

“In order for students to get to the point where they can learn, they need to feel a sense of belonging. They need to feel cared for and loved,” Pavlakis said.

“If we spend part of our day telling students, ‘you don’t look the right way. You’re not dressed the right way, you could be unsafe because you have a hat or a hood on,’ kids aren’t going to feel loved supported a sense of belonging,”

A version of this article appeared in the November 23, 2022 edition of Education Week as School Dress Codes Aren’t Fair to Everyone, Federal Study Finds

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Why School Dress Codes Are Often Unfair

Students of color and girls are disproportionately punished for violating these policies.

Dress Codes and Equity in Schools

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While the reasons for instituting dress codes often revolve around equity and safety, research shows these policies affect students unequally.

School dress codes have been a topic of debate between students, parents and administrators for decades. While students have sought out avenues for free expression and individuality through their attire, many schools have instituted these policies in an effort to minimize classroom distractions, reduce emphasis on students' socioeconomic disparities and keep schools safe.

Nearly 20% of public schools in the 2019-2020 school year required students to wear a uniform and 44% enforced a "strict" dress code, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Often schools ban items like hooded sweatshirts, baggy coats or jackets and caps, saying these items make it easier for students to hide drugs or weapons, or harder for staff to identify students. Everyday attire like sweatpants, athletic shorts and leggings are also frequently prohibited.

And while the reasons for instituting dress codes often revolve around equity and safety, research shows these policies affect students unequally, with girls and students of color disproportionately facing consequences. In many cases, enforcement makes these students feel less safe, not more.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that schools that enforce strict dress codes enroll predominantly Black and Hispanic students. The report also found that dress codes "more frequently restrict items typically worn by girls" and that "rules about hair and head coverings can disproportionately impact Black students and those of certain religions and cultures."

“I think that the schools where we see the over-policing of dress and the enforcement of dress codes, it's not surprising that those are mostly students of color," says Courtney Mauldin, an assistant professor of educational leadership in the teaching and leadership department at the Syracuse University School of Education. “There's a lot of traditional, antiquated ideas around what it has to look like to do school. And I think people have good intentions, but they're very slow to change when it rubs up against what they've known.”

The result of these policies, the report found, is that this subset of students often faces more disciplinary action related to their attire, which in turn causes them to be removed from class more frequently and miss out on more instructional time. The report calls on the U.S. Department of Education to provide resources to school districts to help them make their dress code policies more equitable.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has long shown that students of color are disproportionally disciplined , and not just for dress code issues.

In an email statement to U.S. News, the department said it will evaluate "effective ways to share information with school communities regarding ways to fulfill students’ civil rights on this important issue."

Who Do Dress Codes Target?

In 2020, two Black students in Houston were suspended when school administrators determined their hair, which they wore in dreadlocks, did not comply with the school's grooming policy, Houston Public Media reported . Policies on hairstyles are often included in school dress codes.

A group of high school track athletes in Albany, New York, were removed from practice in May for wearing sports bras and no shirts. The male athletes on their team were allowed to go shirtless, the Albany Times Union reports. The athletes were then suspended from school when they launched an online petition about gender bias in the school's dress code.

GAO estimated that 93% of school districts have some kind of dress code or policy, though not all of them are considered "strict." More than 90% of those rules prohibit clothing typically worn by female students: items such as “halter or strapless tops,” “skirts or shorts shorter than mid-thigh,” and “yoga pants or any type of skin tight attire,” the report says. Meanwhile, it found that only 69% of districts were as likely to prohibit male students for wearing similar clothing, like a "muscle shirt."

These policies tend to sexualize female students, says Faith Cardillo, a senior at Union High School in New Jersey.

"There can't be any skin showing," she says. "It's very one-sided and very sexist, to say the least, no matter what. The reasoning that they usually give is so that way you're not distracting anyone."

The GAO report also found that about 60 percent of dress codes require staff members to measure students’ bodies and clothing to make sure they comply, which can involve adults touching students, GAO reported. "Consequently, students, particularly girls, may feel less safe at school," the report states.

Financially, dress codes can also be a challenge for low-income families, especially if they're required to buy specific clothes to adhere to a uniform.

However, income disparities are also among the reasons some schools put dress codes in place. Uniform policies can help to disguise "the haves and have-nots," says David Verta, principal at Hammond Central High School in Indiana.

Other policies significantly affect students of minority racial or cultural groups, the report found. For example, more than 80% of districts ban head coverings such as hats, bandanas and scarves, while only about one-third say they allow religious exemptions and "a few" allow for cultural or medical exemptions.

“Are we actually targeting clothing, or is this specific to targeting a student's identity?" Mauldin says. "Because if we're targeting student's identities, then we're sending a message that you don't belong here and you're disrupting the space simply by being, and that's not the message that we want to send to students, especially if schools are supposed to be these places of learning and joy and belonging.”

What Student and Parents Can Do

Under federal law, dress codes cannot be explicitly discriminatory. While dress codes may specify acceptable types of attire, they cannot differ "based on students’ gender, race, religion or other protected characteristics," according to the American Civil Liberties Union, citing civil rights law and the U.S. Constitution's equal protection guarantee. For example, public schools cannot dictate that male students can't wear a skirt, or female students can't wear a suit and tie, if one is confirmed acceptable for the other.

The ACLU advocates for students to be allowed to wear clothing that's consistent with their gender identity and expression. Gender identity is protected under Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools. In June 2021, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights confirmed that sex-based discrimination includes discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Parents should closely examine the school's dress code policy and immediately voice any concerns they have with school or district administrators, says Lydia McNeiley, a college and career coach for the School City of Hammond in Indiana.

"Educators are human and we are learning and making changes, but we have to learn from families if there is something we are missing," she says. "We want students to feel comfortable and happy to be in school."

Student voice is key to effecting change and first-hand stories can help, McNeiley says.

One avenue for student advocacy is social media. "Platforms like TikTok and Instagram allow youth to raise awareness around issues in their schools and community," Mauldin says. "This often gets the attention of school and district leaders."

What Schools Can Do

If dress code issues arise in a classroom, educators should handle them discreetly so as not to embarrass a student, says McNeiley, who was previously a middle school counselor. She says doing this goes a long way in building positive relationships with students.

Often teachers are simply following their school’s policy so as to do their job. But Mauldin challenges educators to question the status quo and think critically about how their school’s dress codes could be problematic. She says administrators should regularly audit their discipline data and see if it reveals any trends of unconscious bias related to race and dress code.

Cardillo says schools and parents should also prioritize educating students at the elementary and middle school levels about boundaries and how to look at their peers respectfully without sexualizing them.

School administrators need to listen to their students and adapt to the changing environment around them, Mauldin says. She notes that formal dress is becoming less a part of work culture than it was years ago, with many jobs offering work from home options.

That was part of the discussion that led to a dress code overhaul in the School City of Hammond, a public school district with nearly 90% students of color. Prior to the pandemic, students were required to wear uniforms: khaki pants and either a white or blue collared shirt. Now, the dress code focuses less on restrictions. Students and staff are now "responsible for managing their own personal 'distractions' without regulating individual students' clothing/self-expression."

The new policy , implemented prior to the 2022-2023 academic year, allows students to wear clothing that is comfortable and expresses their self-identified gender. Students can wear religious attire "without fear of discipline or discrimination," it states.

"Some kids were not happy just because they had to figure out what to wear. It was so easy for them just to put on the khaki pants and a polo," says Verta, whose school is in the School City of Hammond district. "But overall, I think our kids are a lot happier now without it."

It's a policy that McNeiley says she's proud of and hopes other districts can use as a model.

“In general, in education, there has to be some kind of common sense," she says. "Because at the end of the day, you have to go back to the students ... (and do) what's best for them."

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My School is Shaming Girls’ Bodies

Last May, I was counting down the final days of my freshman year at Bartram Trail High School and anxiously waiting to pick up my first high school yearbook. When the yearbooks finally came, I rushed down the hallways to the cafeteria to grab my copy and immediately did what every kid does: I flipped through the pages until I found my photo. But when I found it, my stomach dropped. The school had inserted a black rectangular bar across my chest — censoring my body in my high school yearbook without my knowledge or consent.

The fact that an adult teacher had looked at my photo and decided to censor my chest made me feel exposed and embarrassed. The school had censored the photos of at least 80 other students — all girls — to cover up their chests. Meanwhile, the photos of boys were completely untouched — including a photo of the boys’ swimming team, where they were wearing only swim briefs. I realized then that the school’s issue wasn’t with how students were dressed. The school’s issue was with girls’ bodies.

I felt angry and shamed by the school, but not surprised. My high school — and the entire St. Johns County School District, where my high school is located — has enforced its dress code unfairly against girls for as long as I’ve been a student. Until recently, the school district’s dress code set out different rules for boys and girls, including that girls’ tops must cover the shoulder and be “modest and not revealing or distracting” and that girls’ bottoms may not be less than four inches above the knee — something I received a dress code warning for. On top of these gendered rules, the school district has targeted its enforcement against girls, with about 83 percent of dress code violations issued against female students.

The skirt Riley wore when she was disciplined.

Just a few months earlier, my high school conducted dress code sweeps and pulled dozens of girls out of class because their clothes were “out of code.” One teacher even forced a girl to unzip her sweatshirt in front of other students and staff, even though she said would rather not because she was only wearing a sports bra underneath. The school has also conducted dress-code checks when students enter the building, where girls have been disproportionately scrutinized.

As a girl, I feel like the school cared more about what I was wearing than about my education or comfort. I became so anxious about being dress coded that I often second-guessed myself or found myself changing my outfit multiple times before school. Other girls I know have worn long shirts and pants — including in the heat — to prevent scrutiny, and the repeated dress coding caused one girl to have a panic attack in the bathroom. After speaking with fellow classmates, it is clear that these harmful effects can be even worse for transgender, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming students by reinforcing sex stereotypes, as well as for girls of color.

To fight back against the school’s sexist dress code, I created an online petition to call on the school district to stop sexualizing girls’ bodies and to change its policies. I spoke out with my classmates and parents at school board meetings to share our experiences with the dress code. And in July, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the ACLU of Florida sent a letter explaining that gendered dress codes violate our civil rights and asking the St. Johns County school district to end its discriminatory dress code enforcement against girls. Thanks to all of these efforts, the St. Johns County School Board voted to remove the gendered language from its dress code in time for the new school year.

While I’m glad that the school district took this step, it is not enough to change the language of the dress code. The school district must also change its actions.

In addition to passing the gender-neutral dress code, the school district must create policies to prevent future discriminatory enforcement of its dress code against girls — including by ending the humiliating practice of dress code sweeps and scrutinizing students’ bodies and clothing. The school district should also take steps to hear the concerns and feedback of students and parents about the dress code’s enforcement. It is the school district’s responsibility to ensure a safe and equal learning environment in our schools.

When the school board recently met to discuss the dress code, one of the School Board members said: “You understand that there’s a big difference between an elementary school student’s physical anatomy than there is a high school student … A first-grade student has the same physical size as a first-grade student, if I’m making any sense there.” These comments shocked me at the time, and the more I think about them, the more I realize that the school district oversexualizes and views girls’ bodies as a problem.

It’s time to understand that shaming girls is harmful and discriminatory and makes it unnecessarily stressful for us to get an education. Girls shouldn’t be made to feel that there is something wrong with having a body.

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Dress and Grooming Policies Based on Gender Stereotypes

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Students are waging war on sexist and racist school dress codes — and they’re winning

Traditional dress codes punish marginalized students disproportionately, but this anti-racist, anti-sexist dress code could fix that.

by Nadra Nittle

Emma Stein was just a freshman when she was cited for a dress code violation at her school, suburban Chicago’s Evanston Township High School. A security guard said her dress was too short, so Stein had to pull a pair of sweatpants over her clothes. She was not punished for the infraction, but it was still a really upsetting experience.

“It added a level of insecurity to this already stressful time,” Stein recalled.

Stein wasn’t the only one troubled by the dress code at the 3,700-student school. In 2016, students staged a protest demanding a new policy that didn’t discriminate along gender or racial lines.

And the school’s administration listened.

“We needed to look at getting a new dress code, and we wanted to make sure it was body-positive and didn’t marginalize students,” the school’s principal, Marcus Campbell, said.

In 2017, Evanston Township High School debuted its new dress code, which permitted tank tops, leggings, hats, and other previously banned items. The policy also stated that students were not to be marginalized based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or other identity markers.

The story of Evanston Township High School’s dress code is an increasingly common one. As dress code controversies sweep the education system , parents and students are fighting back against policies that they see as sexist, racist, or both. And more and more schools are listening to these protests, adopting guidelines that reflect a new understanding of what constitutes “appropriate” student dress.

Oregon NOW’s model dress code has had an international impact

Adopting a new dress code isn’t easy when most existing policies are several years old and contain many of the biases schools are edging away from now. So, the Oregon chapter of the National Organization for Women devised a model policy for Portland Public Schools that took effect in 2016 and has since spread across the country.

School districts such as Evanston’s District 202 and California’s San Jose Unified have either borrowed heavily from the dress code policy or adopted it outright. Praised for being inclusive, progressive, and body-positive, the Oregon NOW model may be the foundation for the dress code policies of the future.

“Boys can dress like girls, and girls can dress like boys. You can be trans. You can be cis. ... You can wear whatever you want.”

“Boys can dress like girls, and girls can dress like boys,” explained Oregon NOW president Lisa Frack about the code. “You can be trans. You can be cis. Part and parcel on our mind is whoever you are, you can wear whatever you want.”

Within reason, that is. Clothing featuring images of drugs, alcohol, or obscenities is out, as is gang attire. Still, the dress code affords students a great deal of freedom to present themselves how they see fit. The main dictate is: “You have to cover your parts,” Frack said. But how students do so is up to them. They can wear short clothing, leggings, and tank tops — all garments that have been the source of school dress code conflicts.

Oregon NOW turned its model into Portland Public Schools’ official policy by approaching the school board about it during a 2015 meeting where students raised complaints about the existing code, Frack said. The board quickly agreed to form a working group, a mixture of Oregon NOW members and educators, to develop new guidelines. A few months later, the board agreed to implement the model for the 2016–2017 school year. Frack calls the dress code “the fastest advocacy” she’s worked on to date.

The policy has sparked interest from school officials in both the US and Canada, Frack said. Administrators from Evanston’s District 202, which consists only of Evanston Township High School, reviewed the Oregon model after 300 students protested and asked for changes to be made to the previous policy.

The demonstration prompted Campbell, assistant superintendent as well as principal, to research alternatives online, leading him to the Oregon NOW dress code. He and four Evanston Township High School assistant principals looked over the dress code piece by piece to see if it aligned with the high school’s values. They agreed that it did, and so they presented it to the superintendent, who signed off on it. The new policy, along with an equity statement penned by District 202 administrators, took effect during the 2017–2018 school year.

“I remember last year, a Latinx-identifying kid wore a sombrero two days in a row,” Campbell said. “Seeing him signals that it’s a different kind of school where kids can be free to wear what they want to wear, to express themselves, as long as it doesn’t glorify hate speech or violence, those kinds of things.”

The Oregon model also allows students to wear their hair as they please, an ongoing issue for both African Americans and Native Americans in schools . As recently as August, two religious schools faced criticism for telling black children they couldn’t attend classes because of their hairstyles. At A Book’s Christian Academy in Florida, school officials turned away a 6-year-old black boy for wearing dreadlocks . His family ultimately withdrew him from the school. Later that month, an African-American girl at Christ the King Elementary School in Terrytown, Louisiana, was forced out of class for wearing her hair in braided extensions , a popular black hairstyle that school officials said they banned over the summer.

Hearing about these sorts of dress code scandals drove Oregon NOW to write its model policy. “There was no answer,” Frack said. “Everybody’s got the problem, but what’s the answer? We’re a super small organization, but we thought we could do something besides saying, ‘Doesn’t this stink?’ We could write a model code, and it could be progressive, feminist, and anti-racist.”

Historically, school dress codes in the US have been anything but. While many schools continue to impose dress codes shaped by outmoded race, class, and gender constructs, a growing number are addressing how their policies disproportionately affect certain groups of students more than others, and they are letting students dress mostly as they please.

Students are challenging schools to devise fair and equitable dress codes

Dane Caldwell-Holden, director of student services for the San Jose Unified School District, didn’t realize how dress codes targeted certain groups of students until his district came under fire for its policy. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “As a teacher and administrator, I never gave a thought about that.”

Then, in 2015, a female student was pulled out of class and told to change into a baggy pair of shorts because hers didn’t pass the “fingertip test.” (Many schools say that shorts, skirts, or dresses are too short if they don’t hang past a student’s fingertips.) Humiliated, the student decided to fight the dress code. She and her mother spoke to school officials about how the policy harmed girls, and the following year, her mother sent Caldwell-Holden a link to Oregon NOW’s model.

After he reviewed that policy, Caldwell-Holden consulted with SJUSD’s associate superintendent and rewrote the dress code guidelines in the district handbook based on the Oregon model. District officials and school principals reviewed and revised the policy over several months, and in early 2017, the superintendent presented it to the school board and community members. In June 2017, the board voted to approve the new dress code.

The new policy permits spaghetti straps, halter tops, and short shorts. The previous code in his district had been in use for about 15 years, Caldwell-Holden said, pointing out that’s the case for a number of California districts. Typically, the state develops some sample codes, and school districts adopt one.

“When you look at dress codes, they all look remarkably similar”

“Board policies tend to be replicated,” Caldwell-Holden said. “When you look at dress codes, they all look remarkably similar.”

The old San Jose dress code was never meant to body-shame girls, he said, but to prevent youth from wearing truly disruptive apparel to school. He considers such clothing to be gang attire or T-shirts with violent or profane messages. Rather than direct their attention to these sorts of violations, faculty members unevenly applied the dress code, citing girls nearly all of the time.

“That was completely unfair,” Caldwell-Holden said.

Since about 2010, the disparate impact that school dress codes have on girls and young women has received more attention, according to Todd DeMitchell , a University of New Hampshire professor of education and justice studies. He’s authored two books about dress codes: The Challenges of Mandating School Uniforms in the Public Schools and Student Dress Codes and the First Amendment . DeMitchell can’t point to any one event in the past decade that led to more focus on the discriminatory aspects of dress codes.

“It’s probably the accumulation of a number of policy streams,” he said. “And stories of female students disproportionately being singled out over male students started to be put into more of the popular press. It’s no one single thing, but we do see the news reporting a number of shaming incidents based on student attire.”

He recalled that in 2014, an Orange Park, Florida, high school student was forced to wear a “shame suit” consisting of a shirt and pants printed with the words “dress code violation” because the school considered her clothing too short. The story became national news fodder, complete with photographs of the student in the humiliating outfit. Protests and photographic evidence of rigid policies have driven the school dress code debate this decade, but DeMitchell also points out that social media has contributed as well. The rise of social media and video-sharing websites like YouTube has allowed student dress code complaints to reach critical mass.

Whether student complaints about dress codes go viral or stay local, they have the power to effect change. Carrie Truitt , a member of the Marion County school board in Kentucky, became interested in adopting a new dress code after a 5-foot-10 high school student, who was wearing business attire for Dress for Success Day, was told her dress was too short. The student’s father complained, arguing that male students who wear shorts the same length as his daughter’s dress do not receive citations. Truitt thought the parent had a point and began researching dress codes, leading her to Oregon NOW’s model.

“We have a little bit of bias in enforcement,” Truitt admitted. “I don’t know if we can go as far as Oregon NOW in Kentucky; you have to take into account perceptions and beliefs.”

For example, the idea that a tube top is acceptable to wear to school might rub some community members the wrong way, she said. But Marion County is a fairly liberal community, and school leaders will likely take an interest in a progressive new dress code if they know girls typically get the most citations, Truitt explained.

Not every school or district is open to changing its dress code. In fact, some schools continue to spark controversy with policies that shame female students and police their bodies.

Dress codes have consistently policed gender

In April, Florida teen Lizzy Martinez didn’t want her sunburned skin to get any more irritated, so she showed up to Braden River High School with a long-sleeved shirt and no bra. When she was abruptly pulled out of class, she was confused as to why.

Although the dress code at her school in Bradenton, Florida, did not specify that girls must wear bras, Martinez said that her teacher complained and had her removed from class for being a distraction.

“The dean asked me if I was wearing a bra,” she said. “They made me put a shirt on over my shirt, and band-aids over my nipples.”

But that’s not all. Martinez, 17, said that she was also asked to stand up, jump up and down, and move around, “so the dean could see the motion in my breasts.”

Mitchell Teitelbaum, general counsel for Manatee County School District, said that student privacy laws prevent him from getting into specifics about Martinez’s account of events.

“There is a dispute as to the underlying facts that transpired at the school that day,” he said. But Teitelbaum added that “this district was clear it could have been handled better.”

The ordeal resulted in Martinez missing two hours of class time that day, she said. Altogether, the teen estimates that she missed about a week and a half of school because of the stress of the situation. Teachers discussed what happened to her with students, and many misrepresented the facts, she said.

“I felt really, like, attacked, singled out,” Martinez said.

But she and her mother did not keep quiet about the incident, which became a national news story . Martinez took to Twitter to describe how she’d been treated , and she and her mother both spoke to the press. Her dress code infraction fueled more debate about how these policies sexualize young women.

“It crossed a line,” said Emma Roth, a fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. “We have seen dress code enforcement problems pop up all across the country. School administrators disproportionately enforce dress codes against girls and subgroups of girls — girls of color, gender non-conforming girls, trans girls, girls with curvier body types.”

The ACLU has traded letters with Braden River High about Martinez’s treatment, but so far no resolution has been reached, Roth said.

“They claim they’ve taken some kind of corrective measures, but we don’t know what those corrective measures are,” she said. “We find their response completely unsatisfactory.”

The ACLU would like the school to train teachers to avoid such incidents from happening in the future. They also want the faculty to stop, as Roth put it, “harassing” students who violate the dress code. That means no requests for youth to make any physical movements because of dress code violations, Roth explained. The Oregon NOW model, for instance, prohibits staff enforcing these policies from ordering students to bend over, hold up their arms, or make other motions.

Teitelbaum disputes Roth’s characterization of the school district’s action. Since the controversy, he says Manatee County has provided staff trainings and clarified wording in the dress code about what constitutes distracting or disruptive attire .

Martinez wants schools to exercise more sensitivity when it comes to student dress. “Nowadays, there’s all these different genders or students who don’t conform to one gender,” she said. “It’s totally unfair to say to somebody, ‘Girls have to dress and act this way, and boys have to dress and act this way.’”

LGBTQ youth are vulnerable to school dress code policies

Schools nationally have tried to prevent LGBTQ youth from wearing their preferred attire to prom , homecoming, graduation, and other high-profile events. But choosing clothing for school can be a daily struggle for gender-nonconforming students because dress codes have historically served to make students heed traditional gender roles. And a scan of school dress codes from several decades ago make it clear how administrators viewed gender through a narrow lens. Policies dictated that girls wear skirts, dresses, or blouses.

But boys had to conform to strict gender roles, too. In the early 1960s, the dress code at Pius X High School in Downey , California, cautioned boys as follows:

“Two extremes are to be avoided: both a careless, untidy appearance, and a vain, effeminate use of extreme fashions. What the school seeks to promote in a student is a clean, neat, well-groomed, manly appearance.”

The expectation for a “manly appearance” is why boys, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, continue to face school earring bans. Plus, some schools, such as North Carolina’s public K–8 Charter Day School, require girls to wear skirts .

Increasingly, students are challenging gender-based dress codes, and GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) is one of many organizations advocating for them. In 2015, it updated its model district policy for transgender and gender-nonconforming students . The policy includes guidance about student attire, stating that dress codes may not be based on gender and that students have the right to dress in accordance with their gender identity. Moreover, schools can’t use dress codes to target transgender and gender-nonconforming students.

Ikaika Regidor, GLSEN’s director of education and youth programs, said that he understands that schools have dress code policies to prepare students for adulthood and the workforce, but the enforcement of the policies is often problematic.

“We ended up getting into a place in which some groups of students end up getting hurt more than others,” he said. Students feel, “I’m coming to school. I’m being my authentic self,” only to be told they can’t, he continued.

Regidor said that schools need more training and need to streamline who enforces dress codes. Doing so ensures the staffers imposing these policies on students have the tools to do so fairly, properly, and sensitively to gender-nonconforming youth. GLSEN offers training to schools and educates students about their rights as well. The organization teamed up with the ACLU to give youth a wallet-sized card they can show to administrators who wrongfully cite them for dress code violations.

To avoid litigation, more school districts have implemented gender-neutral dress codes. In 2015, Puerto Rico, where students wear uniforms, changed its policy to permit boys to wear skirts and girls to wear pants. It’s a move GLSEN urges more school systems to make. Regidor said some school officials are ignorant about best practices for dress codes and LGBTQ youth. But once they’re educated, they stop enforcing discriminatory policies. Sometimes, though, the discrimination is intended.

“We could try to train them,” he said. “We could try to change hearts and minds, but we also know there are some administrators who have biases. There’s still work to be done by schools, by states.”

Disciplined for wearing braids to school

Deanna and Mya Cook object to how dress codes have long regulated both gender and race. The twins attend a Boston-area charter school that dictates skirt length, shoe color, nail polish, and makeup . But the girls never thought they’d get in trouble for wearing braided extensions. Last year, that’s exactly what happened.

Adopted by white parents, the girls said they got braids for the first time to connect with their African-American heritage. When they showed up at Mystic Valley Regional Charter School with the hairstyles, however, the school disciplined both girls, now 17. Mystic Valley did not respond to Vox’s request for comment about its dress code.

“When we came back to school, we were told braids were not allowed,” Mya said. “They were inappropriate, drastic, needed to be fixed. It really hurt me to my core. I didn’t know what to do because braids meant a lot to me, and they kept telling me to take them out.”

She thought she’d be expelled, and no one would be the wiser. But the school’s treatment of the Cook sisters garnered media attention, and the ACLU, the NAACP, and other groups advocated for the girls.

After a complaint was filed with the state accusing the school’s dress code of being discriminatory, Mystic Valley relented. The school now permits braids, but the twins say it has implemented new rules they believe are retaliatory. Black hair ties, the most common color available in stores, are forbidden; students must wear either navy blue or white hair ties to match the school uniform colors, they said. The girls are not allowed to accessorize their braids with clips, clasps, or beads either.

Similar incidents keep happening to black girls, who are disproportionately pushed out of school due to dress code violations, according to the National Women’s Law Center “Dress Coded” report . Their bodies, hair, and hair accessories such as head wraps are policed more, the study found.

“Many dress code policies include a lot of vague and subjective language that really rubs against our biases”

“Many dress code policies include a lot of vague and subjective language that really rubs against our biases,” said Nia Evans, NWLC’s manager of campaign and digital strategies for education. “They include words like ‘appropriate,’ ‘not distracting.’ Because of racism and sexism, I think there are black girls who have kinky, natural hair and are not perceived as clean or appropriate.”

She said rigid dress codes signal to female students that their bodies are a problem. Black girls are uniquely vulnerable because they’re already more likely than other female students to be suspended from school. Evans argues that forcing them out of class for any reason increases their chances of quitting school and entering the prison system. Accordingly, missing class because of dress code citations may have serious consequences.

Concerns about liberal dress code policies

As schools implement new dress codes in an effort to make these policies more equitable for students, they still contend with some doubts and concerns from community members. When San Jose Unified updated its dress code, some school officials and parents feared that a more lax policy would result in girls showing up to school in attire more fit for the nightclub than for school. Caldwell-Holden says that hasn’t happened. Instead, he rarely hears about schools issuing dress code citations and no longer receives complaints from students about the policy.

So far, the district has received just one nasty comment about its new code, he said. Sent in August 2017, it said, “I am just writing to say how disgusted I was to read … that halter tops, spaghetti straps, and short shorts will be allowed in school now. Seems to be that you are following in the new California tradition: slut everything up and dumb everything down.”

But there was a twist. The writer ended the comment by remarking, “I’m sure glad I don’t have kids in school.”

Actual parents have been highly supportive of the change, according to Caldwell-Holden. A few have worried that it might be harder to get kids to follow the rules they set at home about appropriate dress, but that’s it, he said.

Before Portland Public Schools adopted Oregon NOW’s policy, some community members expressed fear that students would abuse the policy and that girls in particular “would show up in bikinis,” Frack recalled. Concerns about the hypersexualization of girls in society are valid, but body-shaming students won’t solve the problem, she said.

“They’re just dressing the way they’re told to dress,” Frack explained. The answer isn’t “we’re going to correct our hypersexualized culture by blaming you.”

While some community members worried that students would dress provocatively, others feared that a less formal code would fail to prepare students for professional life.

“We’re not raising all of our kids to work in a bank. Some are going to have jobs where they don’t have a collar.”

But, Frack pointed out, “We’re not raising all of our kids to work in a bank. Some are going to have jobs where they don’t have a collar.”

Good school dress codes show compassion for students and begin with an equity statement, according to the “Dress Coded” report. Evanston’s District 202 dress code states that it “does not reinforce stereotypes and that [it] does not reinforce or increase marginalization or oppression of any group based on race, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, cultural observance, household income or body type/size.”

“Dress Coded” recommends that policies be culturally sensitive, gender-neutral, body-positive, and not shame students. The report also calls for all staff members who enforce them to receive training. Because most schools don’t collect data about dress code citations, the NWLC advises them to start doing so. A record of these citations gives the public an idea of which students are most often cited and why. Additionally, the organization urges schools to give students a say in dress code policies.

How District 202 changed after updating its dress code

Two years ago, Emma Stein protested outside the District 202 superintendent’s office in a bid to get Evanston Township High to change its dress code. An 11th-grader then, Stein remained at the high school after the Oregon NOW model went into effect her senior year. When the school transitioned to its new dress code, Stein realized that getting dressed in the morning was no longer stressful.

“The amount of anxiety I personally had about even wearing a skirt my grandmother bought me dropped,” she said.

Now in her first year at Northwestern University, Stein recalled how each morning at Evanston Township High, a security guard would scan the students entering campus for dress code violations. The day she received a citation, Stein had been excited to attend an assembly about racial equity. In the end, she found herself derailed by a dress code that framed her appearance unfit for school.

About five years have passed since then, but Stein said the day of her dress code citation is burned into her memory because it caused her such embarrassment. Still, she knew she wasn’t the only girl with the same experience. Stein said she routinely saw other girls pulled aside by female security guards and teachers because of their dress. The fact that so few boys ever received dress code citations made her question the fairness of the policy.

When the more liberal code took effect, “The attire of the students didn’t change very much,” Stein said. This was the outcome Marcus Campbell expected. He said he believed in his students enough to know they wouldn’t abuse the new policy.

“We’re happy people have found it affirming, so they can focus on learning,” he said.

Campbell and Stein described the first day of school under the new code similarly. Both remember the tension on campus dissipating.

“It felt so great,” Campbell recalled. “That feeling is still palpable. It’s so great to have the administration listen to some very reasonable guidelines.”

Now, it’s largely up to students and their parents to determine which attire works best for school, he said.

Stein said that when the current dress code rolled out, students appeared lighter, less burdened. “It was such a dramatic change,” she said. “The change was almost tangible. At least for me, when this policy was amended, there was this collective sigh of relief.”

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