Are School Uniforms sowing seeds of Gender Inequality?

“Skirts at school disempower young girls.”

When I first heard Usha Choudhary, co-founder of Vikalp Sansthan, make this statement I thought it was too dramatic. Ushaji has made it her life’s mission to help young girls fight child marriage and get an education. And so I thought she might be seeing red in every tiny thing. But, when she elaborated her point, I started seeing that it might have some real merit after all.

Her claim was simple. Skirts restrict motion.

“She won’t run at the top of her speed, because she is afraid that the wind will blow her skirt up. She won’t pedal her bicycle fast, because then she’ll have to keep one hand off the handle. She won’t climb the mango trees because she is scared of what someone might see from below. And every time she sits down, she will cross her legs. If a part of her brain is always occupied with minding her skirt, tell me how will she ever do the best that she can? Why can’t she wear pants like the boys? If, for the first fifteen years of her life, you drill into her the habit of minding her skirts , you cannot expect that she’ll be cured of that simply because you put her through a women empowerment workshop at office.”

Her words got me thinking. What she said made a lot of sense. But the question that was bothering me was: how many of our educators even think about this? I feared that the idea of school uniforms is something that is just taken for granted — nobody really thinks about them anymore.

So, I decided to do a quick survey.

I sent out emails to the principals of some of private and public schools in Navi Mumbai. Most of them didn’t care to respond, but three were nice enough to say they were willing to participate as long as their anonymity was maintained. I would have liked it the other way, but then I was simply grateful that someone is at least willing to participate.

The schools allowed me to meet the teachers during recess and discuss whatever I wanted with them. Knowing that I didn’t have a lot of time, I simply told them what my claim was and asked them three questions:

• Why do you think uniforms are necessary?
• Do you agree to the claim that skirts are regressive?
• If you had power and authority, would you change the uniform so that they are gender neutral?

In all, I got 21 responses from the women teachers and 23 from the men. Not a lot to get conclusive insights, but enough to get a preliminary idea.

For the first question, all the teachers had responses that were variants of the three statements below:

12 teachers thought that the uniform was there so that the students are protected from the societal hierarchy based on caste, class, and economic status of their families. The child of a movie star will wear the same clothes as that of a milkman. So, for them, the uniform was an individual-to-individual, equality-based relationship.

25 teachers thought that the point of having uniforms is to make students take their schooling seriously. The uniform is a cultural symbol that binds each and every student to the formal set of values that the school believes in and charges them with the discipline to uphold those values. Thus for these teachers, the uniform is a individual-to-school, value-based relationship.

The remaining 7 teachers thought that the whole point of uniforms is simply to figure out which kids were their students and which were not. It’s a herding technique that let’s everyone know that this boy or that girl belongs to so and so school. Thus, the uniform is essentially a collective-to-school, identity-based relationship.

These three definitions of what a uniform is provide an understanding that the uniform serves different purposes on different levels of association. In this context, I thought that skirts are regressive no matter which individual based definition we choose. Here’s why.

• In the individual-to-individual, equality-based relationship, the clothes being different for boys and girls introduces an inherent difference between the two sexes. There’s nothing regressive about this, of course. Boys and girls are different and so it’s OK to have different clothes. However, the restrictions that skirts bring in do create an inequality in terms of what girls can do relative to what boys can do.
• In the individual-to-school, value-based relationship, the fact that there are two different sets of clothing, seems to suggest that there are two separate sets of values for the two sexes. These two sets are not entirely different, but they are different in a few subtle ways, one of which is how restraint is established. The whole discipline angle to the school uniform basically means that the uniform creates an artificial well-meaning restraint in the students. However, if the uniform is such that it restrains one sex more than the other, there is something wrong.

So, with these thoughts in my mind, it was interesting to see what the teachers had to say about it.

25 of the 44 teachers maintained that there is no negative effect that the skirts brought in.

The number of men who held this view was more than twice the number of men who thought the opposite was true or were uncertain about it. The girls can always wear slacks when they are on the playing field or even when they are not, some of them told me. The first thought that came to my mind was: But slacks are not mentioned in the prescribed description for their school uniform!

The women didn’t show such a strong clustering effect though. I could see that they were giving more thought to the question before answering than their male counterparts. The ones who did end up saying No explained that skirts help young girls come to terms with their ‘feminine nature’. I couldn’t quite understand the term, but and when I asked them, they weren’t able to define it either. The only thing that came out was that masculine and feminine natures express themselves in different ways and the clothes that we wear should reflect that.

Knowing that so many did not believe that skirts were repressive, I had expected that not many would be open to changing the uniform.

As it happens, they are open to it. 23 of them said they would actively try to make it happen. There were 12 people in this 23 who had earlier denied the claim or were uncertain about. Then why did they want to change the uniform at all?

The reason seemed a little too elusive to articulate. Most said that the very notion that boys and girls wear different clothes leaves room for inequality to breed in various ways. When asked to explain and point to one of these ways, they said it is difficult to point at anything, but that they ‘felt’ that it was wrong. Some others said they wanted to change the uniform just to bring in a discussion about how gender inequality was present in schools in ways we could not notice. They wanted this change as a trigger for people to start thinking about it.

When I got a chance to reflect on these partly revealing, partly confusing observations, I understood three things that are undoubtedly true.

1. Uniforms do serve very important functions — they foster a sense of equality, they bind the set of values that a school holds into the mind of the students, and they inculcate a sense of camaraderie. Therefore, what effect the uniform has on the minds of the students is something that educators cannot ignore.
2. Though there are more people who think skirts are not regressive, the number of people who think they are is still significant. This means that a discussion on a larger scale is definitely warranted, and we should be willing to participate in one.
3. There is a significant fraction of the teacher community which thinks that gender inequality does breed in schools, one of reasons for which may be the uniform. The very fact that they are ‘feeling’ that something is off is a red flag.

Perhaps it is now time that we question the values and cultural motifs we pick up at schools and see if we are doing something wrong there.

If this article got you thinking about the issue, hit the green ‘Recommend’ button so that others can read and think about it too. It would mean a lot to me.

Also, tell me what YOU think about this. Thanks.