new thread
The examples I used may have been a little bit extreme, but the point remains.
The point is: a company has a right to require proper appearance (not ATTIRE, but APPEARANCE, which includes EVERYTHING, hair, dress, smell, everything).
What is proper appearance? That is up to the company to decide. Most companies that enforce conservative appearance use "old-fashioned" or deeply-rooted social guidelines of what appearance is proper. It is very unfortunate, but in the last century, our society has been deeming men with long hair as inappropriate and deeming women with any length hair as appropriate. Thus, a company that requires its employees to look "family-friendly" and conform to whatever "good citizen's appearance standards" (inexact terms, but you get the idea) will *naturally* require short hair for men and won't care about hair length on women. You have to understand that companies only adhere to the whatever is considered appropriate in today's society.
It just so happens that society considers men with long hair inappropriate. So, who's to blame, the companies that adhere to this (for whatever reason, either out of reasonable need or out of stupidity/messed up priorities) or the society? Obviously, the society is to blame. The day when it is socially acceptable for men to wear long hair--when any hair length is acceptable for both men and women--only then you'll see companies dropping the shorthair men requirement and treating men the same as women when it comes to hair length (of course, in general, there may still be odd companies with odd requirements).
So, men are not given the same options as women because of social understandings of what acceptable and what is not. Women DO NOT have any rights that permit them to wear any length hair. In fact, if you watched a recent Montel show on a similar issue, you would've seen an example of a corporation that requires all female employees to have
long hair (which posed problems for some African-American female employees that due to the nature of their hair were unwilling to wear their hair long).
--- Please don't blow these hairdye examples out of proportion (an impression I'm getting is that this is what you're doing). They were simply meant to illustrate that there are social guidelines to which companies conform. The example was in the context of this: Just as legislation can't prohibit discrimination against people that wear blue hair, legislation can't prohibit discrimination against men that wear long hair. And if you think that this particular hairdye argument is bullshit, I will find at least three people that swear by dyed hair and that will give you the same sort of arguments about how unfair it is that they are penalized on their jobs because of their appearance choice.
I'm in marketing management with a major corporation, and I have a fifteen-inch ponytail. I have a creative job, which I like very much, and I try to make sure that my appearance and behavior is conservative and professional in every other way. Although in the past few years, I have not encountered any form of prejudice, I do not come in contact with the public - only internal clients. If I were representing my strait-laced company to the public, I would expect to be told that my hair was out of bounds; it offends to many people, and that's just the way it is. You know how most people are - they won't come right out and tell you why they don't like or don't trust you - it's easier just to pass you over. A company trying to make a profit can't afford that.
My coworkers, on the other hand, can take their time figuring me out. It's interesting to note that the old ladies and ultra-conservatives were cool to me at first. Not mean - just cool. Now that they realize I like football, I'm much better educated than most of them, adn I don't have a police record, they consider me one of them. As a matter of fact, the very ones who were stand-offish at first, now nag me to take down my hair at happy-hours. Go figure.