After 27-year-old Londoner Nicola Thorp was dismissed by an outsourcing company of PwC, simply because she refused to wear heels, she started a petition to remove gendered dress codes in offices. As of Friday, that petition has over 119,000 signatures and is eligible to be discussed in the UK Parliament.
When Thorp arrived on her first day at PwC in December in flat shoes, she was told she had to wear shoes with a 2-4 inch heel. She refused, explaining that she would have to then spend her 9-hour shift, escorting people to meetings, in heels.
I said ‘if you can give me a reason as to why wearing flats would impair me to do my job today, then fair enough’, but they couldn’t.Thorp to BBC Radio London
When she pointed out the lack of a gendered dress-code for her male colleagues, she was laughed at and dismissed without any pay.
Subsequently, she went on to discuss the matter with friends and published the ordeal on Facebook. It got traction and comments from other women who said they faced similar instances of gender-discrimination at their work places.
She then launched a petition calling for the removal of such pedantic rules for women. “Current formal work dress codes are out-dated and sexist”, Thorp wrote in her petition. It needed 100,000 signatures to be eligible to get tabled in the Parliament and as of Friday, it crossed the required signatures, with still a day to go for it’s deadline.
PwC on Wednesday told BBC that they had changed their policy and women could wear flat shoes to the workplace “with immediate effect”.
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