Good Clothes, Bad Jobs: How Style Makeovers for Poor Unemployed Women Reproduce Social Inequality

• In Event: 212 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Policy and Politics I

Abstract

This paper draws on 13 months of participant observation of a nonprofit organization that aims to help unemployed poor women become economically self-sufficient by providing them with “style advice” and second-hand business attire to wear during job interviews. Although much research on gender inequality in the workplace rightfully interrogates how elite women negotiate the “glass ceiling,” it is also vital to understand social and symbolic barriers that prevent poor women from getting past the “front door.” To examine one such barrier – workplace standards for appearance – this paper analyzes service interactions between volunteer “personal stylists” and the poor women who are their clients. My analyses build on feminist critiques of U.S. welfare reform, bringing the literatures on volunteerism and “street level bureaucrats” into conversation with recent work on the role of “taste brokers” and “cultural gatekeepers” in maintaining class boundaries.
I found interactions to be structured by organizational understandings of deserving versus undeserving poor, in which certain types of clients (i.e., welfare recipients, domestic abuse survivors, plus-size women, etc.) were rumored to be more or less “picky” and more or less “deserving” of attentive service. These varying levels of “deservingness” predicted whether clients were provided with complete or incomplete interview outfits, ultimately reproducing while obscured persistent inequality across gender, race, class, age, and body size. This work articulates a more nuanced understanding of how symbolic and material boundaries are interconnected, and points to the importance of considering embodiment alongside other categories of difference.

Author

• Kjerstin Gruys, Stanford University