Recently, the prestigious Loyola Law School issued a memo to students including a statement about how female students should dress when clerking.

As is often the case with professional dress codes, women’s clothing choices were addressed, with no suggestions about what is appropriate for men.

This gets at the double bind faced by women in something as simple as choosing what to wear to work.  On the one hand, women are encouraged to look beautiful in their work appearance, as traditionally defined in our culture.  On the other hand, often women are judged for looking too “sexy.”

Ultimately women’s job performance should not be evaluated on their appearance.  It is an example of how “appearance counts” as a theme of femininity affects women in their professional lives in a significant way.

As Drexler argues here in a CNN editorial about the memo what should matter most is, “how women perform their jobs, and not which shoes they happened to choose that morning.”