IT’S a job that still reeks of the glamour of flying’s 1950s heyday. Who is not in awe of how female cabin crew can cope with cranky passengers and screaming babies while serving hot drinks in the tightest of confines on high heels at 30,000 feet without batting a finely lined eyelid or with a well-coiffed hair out of place?
But perhaps this image is changing. Virgin Atlantic has decided that mandatory makeup is no longer required of female stewards during flights. I’m sure the airline’s PR people expected this news to be met with high praise for such emancipatory vision. Instead, it has outlined just how dated the industry can be and that attitudes might not actually have progressed that much since the 1950s.
While Virgin said cabin crew could now work without makeup, they added that staff were welcome to follow the palette of lipstick and foundation set out in their guidelines. Striding even further into the 21st century, the company will also offer female staff the option of wearing trousers as part of their standard uniform rather than only on request.
Mark Anderson, one of Virgin’s senior executives, said the new guidelines would “provide our team with more choice on how they want to express themselves at work”.
That this move is deemed so revolutionary is eye-opening and draws into sharp focus how the industry is one of many that is still driven by aesthetics and image. British Airways, for example, still requires female cabin crew to wear makeup, and only allowed them the option to wear trousers in 2016. According to uniform guidelines from 2015, all BA female crew are expected, as a minimum, to wear lipstick and blusher, to “groom and maintain” their eyebrows and conceal “obvious blemishes … wherever possible”.
I hadn’t really thought much about such gender-dependent hoops that women were supposed to jump through at work until, as a young journalist, a (female) colleague was told (yes, told) by a (male) news editor to put on some lipstick before going out on a job. We were jaw-droppingly horrified. This was not a requirement I’d encountered because, as a subeditor on a daily newspaper, I was only allowed out after dark and was kept confined to the office until after midnight, out of sight of the public eye. It didn’t matter to the management two hoots what I looked like. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that there were different rules for my counterparts on the reporters’ desk.
Of course, lots of women like wearing makeup. Many, indeed, choose to follow particular career paths such as cabin crewing partly because of the associated image. But that’s the point. It’s about choice. I’m not much of a makeup wearer, and that wee smidge of lippy in my byline photie is about as glam as it gets for me. But that’s my choice. For “special occasions”, however, I have been known to make more of an effort and wheel out my rather spartan makeup bag, the contents of which date back to my wedding day almost 25 years ago (I don’t buy that line about the stuff going off).
And that’s fine now and again. But to face every working day having to slap on the slap? I would last a week before I’d have to consider a career change. Somehow I don’t think cabin crewing would be a viable option.
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