The Twitter hashtag #fawcettflatsFriday was started by the Fawcett Society after a woman was sent home from her temp job at PricewaterhouseCoopers for wearing flat shoes. Women (and a few men) have today been posting photographs of themselves at work wearing flats. To send a woman home for not wearing heels is clearly terrible in principle, and as a temp she presumably lost out on a day’s pay. Temp workers, most of whom are women, are typically precarious, and unprotected by large swathes of employment law. For many of them, losing a day’s wage can have serious consequences. Sending the worker home was garbage, and PwC have been rightly criticised. But the hashtag, too, however well-intentioned by the individual women using it, raises some disquiet.
