The Words We Tell Our Students

Even after dress codes ban body parts and clothes that expose the body—a clear message that parts of you should be hidden—the words that dress codes use further reinforce this idea. Most schools offer a few sentences at the beginning of their dress code to justify its existence. Others explain the reasoning for rules when discussing why particular items are prohibited. Here are a few examples:

Words matter. Some dress codes are literally telling students that their bodies and modes of dress are distractions or linked to their value or self worth. When speaking specifically about how dress codes are sexualizing students, it is largely the female students who receive these messages.

We manually extracted the most common words used to offer any rationale for the dress code policies. Explore examples below.

Policies using phrases like “distract” or “disrupt” are in the vast majority, representing 76% of the schools in our dataset. The phrasing has not gone unnoticed by students. In 2014, students began using the hashtag #IAmNotADistraction in retaliation of policies just like these. The typical argument is that they are distracting their male classmates and, disturbingly, sometimes adult men.

Some suggest that dress codes that use words like these send a complex message to all students: girls are responsible for the way that others see them (and continuing that line of logic, what others do to them) and it relays to boys that they are not in control of their own actions and that others’ bodies are theirs to judge. If these are the lessons that students learn at an early age, it’s not a far leap to see why victims of sexual assault are often asked “what were you wearing?” as if their clothing choices excuse the violence they endured.

Sending troubling messages is only one problem with vague, coded language. When rules are open-ended, they allow for interpretation and create an opening for implicit bias to slip in. This is especially important when examining repercussions of dress codes outside the scope of sexualization, especially as a tool for racism.

Fifty percent of the schools we investigated state that the final determination of whether or not a student is violating the dress code will be subjective. Those clauses often look like this:

Although we don’t have data from the schools in our dataset about the enforcement of these subjective policies, previous research can give us an idea of how these policies can be influenced by bias.

Reports indicate that students who are “curvy” or “busty” are policed more than their less-curvy classmates. Similarly, studies have found that girls of color are stereotypically perceived as “hypersexualized,” “provocative,” and “not ladylike” compared to their white classmates and are disproportionately targeted in the enforcement of dress codes. They are found in violation of their school’s dress codes more often than their white classmates, even when both were breaking the rules.

This bias extends beyond the sexualization of students. Words like “clean”, “neat”, and “distracting” have been used to police Black boys and girls, removing them from class, threatening them with suspension, and literally cutting their hair all for wearing their hair the way it naturally grows out of their head. Similarly, words like “safe” have been used to regulate clothes that reinforce “[ideas of] criminality” like the hoodies, sagging pants, and oversized t-shirts worn primarily by boys of color. Ultimately, these vague words can and do play into the sexualization of students, but their effects are also much further-reaching. Racial bias, in particular, is pervasive in dress codes and the topic will be explored in more detail in a forthcoming article.