Can you wear shorts to work? Even in a heat wave, maybe not

A new Wall Street Journal/ Ipsos Poll finding that shorts in the workplace is moot. Looking specifically at attitudes toward men’s clothing, it found that a whopping 41% said it was inappropriate for men to wear shorts in the office—no climate change exception allowed. To be sure, 48% of respondents said wearing shorts was sometimes appropriate, and 10% said it was always appropriate.

Women and nonbinary workers, whose clothing choices are not part of the poll, have different rules to follow. In theory, women have a bit more freedom than men in the workplace, as they can wear less warm clothing including skirts and dresses. But of course there’s more to this wardrobe need than meets the eye. The dress code was mostly made up by those at the top, who happen to be mostly still Cish but, and skirts are therefore an inherently weighty choice made for what the male gaze deems fit for the job. With shorts or, for women, inappropriate skirts, you emphasize the bottom (your body). You don’t want to highlight your lower body, says Mary Lou Andre, editor of DressingWell.com Chicago Tribune in 2013. And non-binary employees are left in tough situations, like El Layla Johnson say to New York Time in June this year: [They] felt like there was a guidebook or rules that people received and my copy got lost in the mail.

Meanwhile, the urgency of a climate disaster cannot be discounted this summer, as it can be felt in the air and the scorching heat. During the month of July, the world bakes, when the world’s highest temperatures have ever been recorded. Paleoclimate scientist Darrell Kaufman, who has specialized in researching evidence of prehistoric climates for a long time, found a widely reported statistic to be inaccurate: that daily temperatures were the highest in 100,000 years. However, the speed of the Earth’s warming showed him that by the end of the century it would be the warmest in millions of years.

This type of heat is not only uncomfortable, but also deadly: A Study from the Barcelona Institute of Global Health and the French health research institute INSERM estimate that more than 61,000 heat-related deaths occurred last summer. In America, The phoenix was boiling with record highs, and across the burning Mediterranean sea, as the heat wave turned fire in Greece.

However, even if we have other things to focus on, shorts seem too much.

The pants debate returns to the office

As our world continues to heat up without drastic government intervention, many employees, at least in America, are ushered back to headquarters with an email stating that office is not an option. Even if the pandemic has receded, the climate is in a different place than it was three years ago. But the office was petrified, like a gift shop lollipop with a scorpion wedged inside, stuck in his pants.

The general consensus seems to be that corporate America isn’t ready to change its uniform just yet, climate change be damned. Rules about shorts were built into the country, as fashion historian Heather Vaughan Lee has put it NPR in 2015: that Puritan backgrounds continue to influence governments and other regulatory agencies seeking to control the outward appearance of Americans, both as written law and cultural norms.

The Puritans echoed the centuries-old stigma in European style of shorts—they were a thing only boys wearnever young. New York Time critic Vanessa Friedman traces this as far back as the courts of the English nobility, writing that the norm is largely derived from royal tradition where boys are not allowed to wear pants until they are 8 years old. Like many people other critics, Friedman decided that shorts and work clothes were permitted but not without a few rules attached, insisting that you could end up exposing more than just your knees, if you dared to choose more weather-resistant clothing. It took hundreds of years to dispel this mentality, as pants didn’t really become accepted for women until the 1940s 1930sand a short ban was issued statewide in 1940s.

After all, traditions can be hard to shake, especially for the older generation who have lived with certain attitudes throughout their lives. The poll found that many, with boomers the most likely to call shorts never acceptable, at 57%. Another generation, well, chiller about wearing shorts at work. 75% of millennials feel it is always or sometimes acceptable to wear partial trousers at work. Surprisingly, that number shifts to 67% for Gen Z, with Gen X at 56%.

Even though fashion is slowly changing on the runway and in the office, our desires are in a different place these days. Recently Deloitte Survey found that many are tired of wearing suits (45%) and trousers or buttons (31%), and about a third said they would rather take a 10% pay cut than dress up in the office. Indeed, remote work has resulted in a new, slightly more casual wardrobe.

Some suggest that for men, it’s still not a short season. In 2011, the great menswear designer Tom Ford issued his famous decree that shorts should only be worn on tennis courts or on the beach, adding that men living in cities could not wear shorts. That world of fashion has changed drastically since then, as gender and clothing norms have slowly become destabilized both in the world and in the world workplace.

Even if women somehow have a little more leeway to show their legs or wear other things like skirts or dresses on unbearable climate crisis days at work, these rules about clothing are mostly written by those in charge, who still often male. With more fashion choices, women have more gendered rules to follow in the workplace, find researchers from Conversationthat said that various research have found that the perception of women in the workplace still influenced by the way they dress, often in a way that doesn’t fit the perception of men.

Looks like shorts maybe not yet what’s hotalthough men are going to start to really get hot if we don’t change our carbon emissions or our attitudes to gendered office wear. Whatever comes first, I guess. In the end, it’s men’s limitations regarding social norms and fashion that will only lead to a lack of comfort.