Well at Least I Can Wear Heels Again
What Does It Mean to Wear Heels?
Today in shoesplaining: Until your career is at its height, ladies, mayhap yous should stick to flats.
Information technology went similar this. At a reverse-demo event in New York terminal dark, Jorge Cortell, the CEO of the healthcare startup Kanteron Systems, noticed a female attendee wearing shoes. He snapped a picture of the shoes. He then tweeted the picture of the shoes. This is what he said:
Consequence supposed to be for entrepreneurs, VCs, but these heels (I've seen several like this)... WTF? #brainsnotrequired movie.twitter.com/Z1vBKxlLzo
Sexist! the people cried. No, it's not! Cortell responded. His #brainsnotrequired musings were merely protective, he explained, of the wellness of the shoe-wearer. And, by extension, of the health of us all. Heels are dangerous. Heels are dumb. High-heeled shoes are not, as it were, "sensible shoes."
@daveambrose not sexist. Logical. Possibly a man was wearing those. Would exist equally absurd. High heels are STUPID, bad for your health.
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) October 23, 2013
@aronsolomon The superficiality of putting image ahead of health. Yes.
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) October 23, 2013
@rachelkmr @daveambrose Admittedly. As opposed to excessive and unnecessary carbohydrate consumption as I am to high heels. Two wrongs...
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) October 23, 2013
@rachelkmr @daveambrose Very practiced point. Yet, if you lot participate in perpetuating the cultural error, you're hurting yourself and others.
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) October 23, 2013
But, of grade, shoes are not but shoes. Shoes, similar any other clothing choice one must make every day, reveal something—inconveniently, perhaps, but inevitably—nearly the wearer. Chuck Taylors say something. Sambas say something. Adidas shower shoes say something. And, yes, stilettos say something.
The question is what they say. What Cortell was suggesting with his off-handed "WTF?" comment (and with the #brainsnotrequired tag that accompanied it) is that the stiletto-wearer he creep-shotted was putting superficial concerns—appearance, attractiveness, style—over matters of a more pressing variety. (Comfort, perhaps? The power to run a 10k at a moment's notice?) His tweet was suggesting, essentially, an inversely proportional relationship betwixt depth of intelligence and height of heel. It was suggesting, as well, that the footwearer in question was somehow attempting to game a system based on meritocracy using something else: femininity.
Heels, essentially, are cheating. Heels, essentially, are wrong.
@aronsolomon I want to exist part of a culture that appreciates data, scientific discipline, health,choices, improvement...not taboo, cliches, superficiality
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) Oct 23, 2013
@rachelkmr @daveambrose I appreciate your skilful points. But "adapting" to damaging cultural errors is an error in itself. Change. Evolve.
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) October 23, 2013
@ElleRoth20 Not "women". "Anyone choosing to wear loftier heels unnecessarily". Yes. As stupid as drinking also much soda. And many more things.
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) Oct 23, 2013
We can fence at another fourth dimension whether heels are, indeed, the loftier-fructose scourge of the shoe globe. The issue here is their place at a tech demo—an event that finds participants rewarded, ostensibly, on the forcefulness of their ideas and execution, rather than their style. Heels, of course, are more fraught than their fellow-shoes because they're gendered in a way that the others aren't. Stilettos are Lady Shoes. And, as such, they deport, along with an actual lady, the baggage of hundreds of years of freighted femininity. It's easy to see them and all their contradictions—bold and teetering, leg-lengthening and footstep-impairing, empowering and constraining—as representative of the precarious path walked past many women in tech.
In the Valley, as the AP noted before this month, "women who rise to the top tend to be judged more than, both by men and other women, and in guild to succeed they practice have to dress better." And the women in the echelons of the industry, certainly, have their heels and wear them, besides. Marissa Mayer, whose honey of high fashion has become a significant aspect of her public persona, posed for a Vogue profile wearing statement stilettos. Sheryl Sandberg'due south Fourth dimension cover co-starred her heels. Some women in the Valley, Claire Cain Miller wrote in the Times concluding year, "worry that they will not be considered serious technologists if they intendance near clothes." But "many are confident enough to apparel the way they desire to."
And all the same—here is the catch of it—the sartorial statutes of the tech manufacture at large assume the reverse: that to dress well is, indeed, to be hiding something. To pay obvious attending to one'south own appearance is to protest also much. Mark Zuckerberg wears hoodies because he can, only as well because they remind all who behold him that he has better things to call back well-nigh than his clothes. Steve Jobs did the same with his black mock-turtlenecks. (Though it's worth noting that the Apple founder'southward symbols of sartorial laissez-faire were designed by Issey Miyake.) As Lizzie Widdicombe wrote in a contempo New Yorker profile of Brian Golberg, the aspiring entrepreneur "tends to article of clothing baggy polo shirts, purchased in San Francisco, where, as he puts it, 'the schlubbier you are, the more credibility you take.'"
Time and attending are naught-sum things, and to devote as well much effort to one'due south appearance is to take attempt abroad, implicitly, from one's other pursuits—professional success among them. "The perception in Silicon Valley is that if you wearing apparel well, you couldn't mayhap be smart, or yous're in P.R. but couldn't possibly run a visitor," Leila Janah, founder and CEO of the job-connection site Samasource , told Miller.
Which is to say, it seems that the tech industry has not simply a glass ceiling, but also a shoe ceiling. Once you're in the C-suite, you can wearable heels every bit loftier as you want; until then, heels may earn you a creep-shot and a "WTF?" from men who are meant to be your peers.
The problem with that is not merely the double-standard for women working in the same industry; information technology's also that many women who aspire to leadership roles would adopt not to wear hoodies and shower shoes as they work their way upward. Many women would rather wear shoes that make them look a trivial scrap taller—that raise them upward as they raise themselves upwardly. As Janah put it, "I recall briefly attempting the Adidas and jeans and sweatshirt over T-shirt look, but I realized I was trying to dress like a immature tech geek, and that just wasn't me. Manner is expressing my artful sense just as much as our website is."
And so what's an ambitious adult female to practice? To heel, or not to heel? Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and the other founders of the women's move fought against the constraints of traditional femininity: They wanted non only equal representation, simply also freedom from social pressures that came at the expense of women'south careers. Those pressures were embodied, in some sense, by the heel. The motility's success, even so, has meant that femininity is no longer a force; information technology is, or at least it is more it'southward been before, a choice. Which ways that #havingitall can negotiate its lines not just according to work and family, simply as well according to work and way. Wired'southward cover daughter this month is, literally, a daughter. She may be the future Steve Jobs, Wired declares. And even if she's not, she is likely the future in some other manner. It is revealing, maybe, that this symbolic tech-worker-of-the-future wears a uniform. And that you cannot run across her shoes.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/what-does-it-mean-to-wear-heels/280810/
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