<p><a href=“Australian TV Anchor Wears Same Suit Every Day For A Year To Prove Sexism Is Going Strong | HuffPost Latest News”>HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost;
<p>I think this is, sadly, sooooooo true. If a woman wore the same thing twice in one month, she’d be ridiculed. But all a man has to do is show up in a suit and no one notices anything else. </p>
<p>And parents don’t hire men to babysit their kids… The sexes are different, this is one of those differences. I don’t see the big deal. </p>
<p>It is unfortunate. I give him props for supporting his co-anchor with this experiment. In this age of email, twitter, fb, etc, it is very hard to be a public figure. Everyone is a critical bad@$$, and feel he or she can say anything since its anonymous.</p>
<p>Same suit? My goodness, I can only imagine how badly this suit must have stunk by the end of his experiment! ;)</p>
<p>Jokes aside, it is sad that people behave like pure jerks under the cover of Internet anonymity. </p>
<p>^^^ He said he had to skip a few days here and there to get it dry cleaned. </p>
<p>He should have just bought a couple of identical suits so that one could be easily dry-cleaned while the other was worn.</p>
<p>Women shouldn’t really complain; we do this to ourselves. We’re the peacocks of the human race. if we dressed only in boring men styles and colors, no one would notice how often we repeat our clothes. Instead, most of us like to select wow-outfits and they’re just too rememberable. </p>
<p>I would imagine it comes down to the job description and expectations. Rachel Maddow, who I’m guessing was hired for her brain and content production, wears the same ugly jacket over a v-neck tshirt and jeans practically every time I tune in. She has 2-3 bad jackets max. Most tv news anchors, I gather, are readers and don’t write their own material. While they may be plenty smart and capable of doing it they are hired for approachable looks and solid, engaging delivery. </p>
<p>p.s. Please don’t interpret that to mean that I don’t think they are smart and capable of more . . . I just believe that’s not what the current job description looks like.</p>
<p>^^ Rachel Maddow actually talked about her on-air wardrobe in a Glamour interview:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>She also mentions newswomen who look like they’re going clubbing.</p>
<p>Her jackets are especially ugly though and my theory is that a few years into the same jacket for the reasons stated above the network guys cynically decided that that brown and grayish kind of ombre’ striped one says, “I’m too busy researching the deeper hidden links to this story all day to shop for a decent looking neutral jacket.” </p>
<p>And just to prove my theory that Roz Chast has a perfect cartoon for every situation I give you “The Art of Banter”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/If-you-re-interested-in-entering-the-high-paying-world-of-TV-journalism-f-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8477994_.htm”>http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/If-you-re-interested-in-entering-the-high-paying-world-of-TV-journalism-f-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8477994_.htm</a></p>
<p>This smacks of that “woman walking on the street getting catcalls” discussion. It is sad that in our society, what is “acceptable” for a man to wear in public or when in front of a TV camera is different from what is “acceptable” for a woman to wear. What man could show cleavage in a professional setting and get taken seriously? Yet people would “argue for her rights” to show her cleavage?</p>
<p>PS - uh, you DO think that he had several of the same suit made, not wore the same one?!???! </p>
<p>Anyone here in the news business? Do the women get a larger wardrobe allowance in their contracts than men because the job requirements are different? How do they find all those clothes?</p>
<p>In our market, the women all mostly wear sleeveless dresses or tops, and the men wear suits. Not that I want to see the men’s hairy (or waxed) arms, but it seems like there is a comfort issue in keeping the studio cold enough that the men don’s sweat without freezing the women to the point of goosebumps.<br>
.
A male anchor recently got fired at age about 60 and filed an age discrimination suit. Not much chance of a woman lasting that long, even with substantial surgery</p>
<p>One of our local long time female anchors just retired at the age of 70. All through her career she dressed kind of like a svelte Hillary . . . bright colored pantsuits or a basic dress. She was always, as my mother would day, well turned out but definitely had a uniform. In our market the female point of issue seems to be diversity. The stations want a diverse team to reflect the community but the male anchor is never the one who is expected to reflect that. </p>
<p>I had a long discussion about network meteorology with a gentleman while watching our daughters who played on the same sports team for a tournament. He was a trained hurricane center meteorologist but also did the weather on the local channel (not in my state). He said that it’s a particularly tough business for women because of the “weather girl” stigma. Stations want an attractive woman on the show so the weather and traffic people are often not meteorologists. What’s more, he said that it’s tough for women who really are scientists because they have a can’t win situation RE being taken seriously. Men in the business, he said, don’t take a female meteorologist seriously because they feel like she must be “just a weather girl”. </p>
<p>“Women shouldn’t really complain; we do this to ourselves.”</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s a fair statement. Even if we assume your assumption is correct (which I am not sure I agree with, but let’s just assume it is) how is it fair to make the individual suffer for something that the majority of the group does. Isn’t that exactly the argument AGAINST stereotyping: not punishing the individual for what may be common in a group?</p>
<p>I am a woman, and I definitely don’t do it to myself (or anyone else) - not sure how people around me feel about me repeating my outfits every week, but I would certainly like to live in a world where that is not an issue. It’s just so superficial - there is no logical basis why you can’t repeat an outfit, provided you have washed it/cleaned it, and it complies with the dress policy.</p>
<p>The dynamics of the ‘TV weather reporting’ business seems to have evolved. Until Willard Scott came along, it seemed to be all nerdy Mr. Peabody types. There had been the weather girls but Willard and later Al Roker seemed to change all that. Both those guys were impeccably dressed. Saw a feature on Willard back in the day which revealed his stable of suits in his NBC office. Talk about a clothes horse! Nowadays the Weather Report seems to be dominated by females and one of them in our area has become the butt of jokes from a female radio show host, who insists on referring to this particular woman meteorologist (in snug attire) as…cough, cough… “perky.” </p>
<p>Unfortunately the “weather girl” stereotype makes it harder for female scientist who are actual meteorologists to garner respect.</p>
<p>It isn’t unusual for me to wear the same dress a week running and I try to limit my everyday uniform to three dresses per season in regular rotation: one on, one in laundry, one just in case. This doesn’t include special occasional clothes, but that isn’t what tv anchors are wearing.</p>
<p>If I saw a woman wearing the same dress two days in a row, I’d assume she never made it home from her date the night before…</p>