Trust me, women have toes, and we want them protected, too.
The professional equivalent of a field trip, a site visit is an excursion to a manufacturing warehouse, research laboratory, or partner facility for a given project, and also an excellent career opportunity. Site visits provide hands-on experience, rare networking opportunities, and, best of all, the often neglected “professional travel” skillset.
The ability to professionally travel indisputably expands an engineer’s knowledge base and confidence, and cracks advancement options wide open. Someone who does not need travel training often skips the line of employers’ top early-career picks for future location-based certifications, conferences, and additional industrial site visits.
Standard Guidelines
When presented with a steel-toed-boot-requiring tour, any woman engineer should (and will) jump at the chance. She’ll start getting registered, cleared, and prepped, planning for not only the visit, but for all the opportunities it could afford her. Then comes the discouraging logistical email.
Standard guidelines for visitors list khaki pants, a dress shirt and tie, and steel-toed boots, but seldom include guidance for safe and professional dress specific to women. While a woman could don her finest collared shirt and tie, she should not be expected to conform to masculine dress codes for lack of alternative guidance (the same way I would not expect the inverse from a man).
While not all sites are the same, the guidance provided to women is consistently unequal to that provided for men. This fact forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth that seems to haunt the defense industry’s regulations: men don’t understand women’s clothes.
Improved Guidance
Broad suggestions like full-length pants and hair tied back are sometimes recommended, but could easily go further. Comfortable dress pants with a blazer of your choice, business-style blouse with full-length sleeves and no hanging elements, tour will require stairs, tight skirts/dresses and heels discouraged, or bags not permitted, pockets recommended — these are simple tips I’ve garnered through experience, but are, unfortunately, rarely provided outright.
Adding suggestions like these to official guidance ensures women’s safety and comfort are not predicated on their ability to guess which clothing items are suitable for a given site. By acknowledging that women’s clothes differ from men’s but that their dress requirements on-site are just as important, we assert that women exist in these spaces, and your organization cares about what happens to us there.
Moving from the unspoken rules of site visit dress codes to specific cases, I’d like to highlight a more personal example.
Individual Experience
A pair of steel-toed boots is the cornerstone of site visit safety, and the first time I was tasked with purchasing them, I had a few hours’ notice and no guidance aside from Google on where I could find them. So me and my wits took off on a perilous journey to scour the shelves of the nearest Walmart, playing a one-sided game of Marco Polo in the endless aisles until I found them … in the men’s section.
Box after box after box, every size, every style, was too big and designed for a completely different anatomy. I could have made one of these men’s shoes work, I suppose, but not without significant safety compromises.
In a location with loose cabling, heavy metallic structures suspended in the air, flammable materials, and uncertain terrain, an ill-fitting shoe weighted for someone twice my size is a recipe for disaster. Imagine my relief when a single box near the end, close enough to my size, had “women” stamped across the label.
Finally, I thought. Let’s do this. They were pink. Bright, hot pink.
Professional Choices
If you are the target demographic for this product, a woman who works on a construction site, shipyard, warehouse, etc., I’m thrilled you get to wear your favorite color boots to work, and you’re empowered by bringing an element of femininity to your male-dominated field. I like pink, too, and Elle Woods is a personal hero.
My argument is not that these boots shouldn’t exist, nor is it that they don’t have a market. It’s that myself, and any other woman who buys her boots at that Walmart, are reduced to singular options while men receive vast arrays of styles, inserts, and safety considerations.
In the end, I did buy the boots and I did wear them, eventually donating them after moving to a role with broader wardrobe requirements. Even so, the same problem resurfaces every time I hear a supervisor describe what to wear for the men on his team and give the women offhanded directions to find the equivalent.
Obviously, attire apathy is far from the most pressing issue working women face today, but it stands as a poignant example of the response with which our concerns are too often met: “I don’t know, figure it out yourself.”
