Modest Workwear: the organisational impact of dress & appearance
Lead Research Organisation:
University of the Arts London
Department Name: London College of Fashion
Abstract
This project extends to new user communities and non-academic audiences the impact of insights from AHRC project Modest Fashion in UK Women's Working Life led by Prof. Lewis (UAL) and Prof. Aune (Coventry University). The project explored women's experience of negotiating dress in religious contexts: when working for faith-based organisations in the UK (e.g. places of worship, charities) and when travelling to work in Saudi Arabia where they had to wear an abaya. The 12 month project has 3 main activities:
1) Develop, deliver, and evaluate 6-8 sessions in the UK and 1-2 for international workforces in the Gulf region. Target participants include:
- Human Resources (HR) professionals and diversity and inclusion specialists (including employee network chairs) in organisations in the UK
- Managers and HR professionals operating in the Gulf, including those employed by local, regional and global organisations
- Managers, HR professionals, diversity practitioners, and religious and community leaders working for UK faith-based and interfaith organisations
- Policy makers and specialists in interfaith and intercultural dialogue in the UK and internationally
2) Work with partners to develop sector-appropriate Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
3) Work with graphic designer to develop 35 infographics and select media images for visual toolkit
The project develops and tests training materials in order to:
1) help managers, HR professionals and diversity practitioners understand how organisational requirements for modest dress and behaviour affect staff experience and organisational performance, reaching participants in UK and global organisations;
2) help managers, policy makers and intercultural partners in faith-based, interfaith and policy sectors evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of modest dress cultures and behaviours for their work;
3) help organisations better respond to religiously related codes of modest dress and behaviour by improving awareness of the variety of circumstances in which modesty requirements are encountered;
4) show how organisational performance can be enhanced by recognising that organisational culture, functionality and reputation are affected by how individuals experience workplace modesty requirements (positively or/and negatively, and regardless of personal religious or secular beliefs or practices);
5) support policy and community work on interfaith, faith-secular and intercultural dialogue by exploring how improved knowledge about modest fashion can a) help avoid pitfalls in process and b) generate rich content for dialogue activities.
These new directions for project activities are vital at a time when attitudes to religion and claims made in the name of religion fuel division and social unrest. As employers and organisations seek to demonstrate commitment to anti-racism (also in response to the Black Lives Matter movement), our training programme sensitises managers, HR and diversity practitioners to the intersectional aspects of inequalities triggered by dress and appearance. We help participants develop visual skills to understand the role of dress in the workplace, for instance regarding non-western fashion as businesswear or managing gender inequalities in online meetings. For religious leaders, enhanced visual literacy will help remedy problems of appearance-based discrimination for post-holders and employees. For interfaith and intercultural dialogue, community groups and policy makers, insights on the diversity of religious approaches to modesty will increase their confidence to avoid simply deferring to the most conservative or orthodox voices. As religious communities' responses to COVID-19 measures have varied widely (from vaccine fears to worship or wedding attendance), policy makers and politicians urgently require guidance on looking beyond stereotypes (often signalled by dress/hair) to include diverse voices and communities.
1) Develop, deliver, and evaluate 6-8 sessions in the UK and 1-2 for international workforces in the Gulf region. Target participants include:
- Human Resources (HR) professionals and diversity and inclusion specialists (including employee network chairs) in organisations in the UK
- Managers and HR professionals operating in the Gulf, including those employed by local, regional and global organisations
- Managers, HR professionals, diversity practitioners, and religious and community leaders working for UK faith-based and interfaith organisations
- Policy makers and specialists in interfaith and intercultural dialogue in the UK and internationally
2) Work with partners to develop sector-appropriate Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
3) Work with graphic designer to develop 35 infographics and select media images for visual toolkit
The project develops and tests training materials in order to:
1) help managers, HR professionals and diversity practitioners understand how organisational requirements for modest dress and behaviour affect staff experience and organisational performance, reaching participants in UK and global organisations;
2) help managers, policy makers and intercultural partners in faith-based, interfaith and policy sectors evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of modest dress cultures and behaviours for their work;
3) help organisations better respond to religiously related codes of modest dress and behaviour by improving awareness of the variety of circumstances in which modesty requirements are encountered;
4) show how organisational performance can be enhanced by recognising that organisational culture, functionality and reputation are affected by how individuals experience workplace modesty requirements (positively or/and negatively, and regardless of personal religious or secular beliefs or practices);
5) support policy and community work on interfaith, faith-secular and intercultural dialogue by exploring how improved knowledge about modest fashion can a) help avoid pitfalls in process and b) generate rich content for dialogue activities.
These new directions for project activities are vital at a time when attitudes to religion and claims made in the name of religion fuel division and social unrest. As employers and organisations seek to demonstrate commitment to anti-racism (also in response to the Black Lives Matter movement), our training programme sensitises managers, HR and diversity practitioners to the intersectional aspects of inequalities triggered by dress and appearance. We help participants develop visual skills to understand the role of dress in the workplace, for instance regarding non-western fashion as businesswear or managing gender inequalities in online meetings. For religious leaders, enhanced visual literacy will help remedy problems of appearance-based discrimination for post-holders and employees. For interfaith and intercultural dialogue, community groups and policy makers, insights on the diversity of religious approaches to modesty will increase their confidence to avoid simply deferring to the most conservative or orthodox voices. As religious communities' responses to COVID-19 measures have varied widely (from vaccine fears to worship or wedding attendance), policy makers and politicians urgently require guidance on looking beyond stereotypes (often signalled by dress/hair) to include diverse voices and communities.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Reina Lewis (Principal Investigator) | |
| Kristin Aune (Co-Investigator) |
| Description | Our two key objectives were to develop and test training materials for managers, HR professionals, and equality, diversity and inclusion practitioners to better comprehend how organisational requirements for modest dress and behaviour impact on staff experience and organisational performance, both in the UK and for global firms operating in the Gulf. For the interfaith sector, our additional objective was to help explore the potential of modest dress as content for dialogue activities. We met both these objectives by iteratively developing an interactive workshop, "Religion and Dress at Work: Opportunities and Pitfalls." We designed, trialled, and revised a range of participatory exercises. These included: visual elicitation; discussion of the language of modesty and shame; scenario building to explore how appearance and dress can impact on equality of employment opportunity; critical reading exercises to revitalise policy review; and capacity building for the interfaith sector on how modest dress can be mobilised as a dialogue communication tool. We also worked with a graphic designer to create an image bank of 50 open-source images for workshop exercises, differentiating for UK and Dubai usage, and to produce a suite of 100 bespoke line images addressing topics highlighted in the workshops. Workshops were adapted to each partner's needs, and were informed by advisory board input, participant feedback, and guidance from project partners. We worked closely with partners and workshop hosts to produce sector specific CPD certification. As intended, this objective legitimated and encouraged participation in diversity training. The certification also met our objective to elevate religion and belief as an organisational diversity priority. The workshop was delivered three times online in the UK and once offline in Dubai (where we also met our objective of contributing to intercultural programming with a PI keynote and panel at Dubai 2020 Expo). For mostly pandemic-related reasons (below), other projected workshops in the UK did not take place. In the UK and in Dubai, participants' life experiences brought diverse perspectives and knowledges to the conversation. We used their insights to refine the content after each session, working intensively with the graphic designer each time to finesse our visuals in this highly contentious area. The workshop and the keynote in Dubai further emphasised - as we had suspected - the delicacy of terminology related to belief and religious cultures in different transnational contexts. Participants avoided referring to religion or religious dress, often using 'cultural dress' or 'national dress' as synonymous (likely reflecting UAE government discourse). Our iterative model allowed us to tweak workshop components in light of delivery experiences. For example, when participants in our initial test session demonstrated aversion to roleplay, we developed a scenario-building activity that allowed participants to 'encounter' the same concerns about workplace relations without the discomfort of personally enunciating a potentially 'alien' belief position. A poll conducted before and after each workshop showed that participants overwhelming agreed that their understanding of religion and dress in the work settings had increased. Participants were also more confident challenging discrimination based on religion or belief after the workshop. |
| Exploitation Route | Project outcomes can be taken forward in further delivery of our workshop packages, as already commissioned by UAL Short Courses. Our project design deliberately produced workshop materials as independent components that can be put together in different combinations, so we envisage opportunity to deliver short or long-form versions of the piloted training, with flexibility to revise the exercises built in. To this end, our visual toolkit is designed to be as future-proof as possible, with each component rendered so that team members who are not design professionals can modify the visuals for new opportunities as they emerge. We have pioneered CPD accreditation with in-built flexibility for different sectors of employment. Our calibrated learning outcomes measure both subject specific knowledges, and visual literacy, as well as transferable skills. As such, the certification can be used in future workshop delivery, and the schema could be adapted for accreditation of other types of training and development. Partner organisations and those who hosted workshops may benefit from our fresh conceptualisation of how to evaluate learning and skills acquisition: our host organisation in Dubai was preparing to cascade the training insights to other teams and other parts of their organisation. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Retail,Other |
| Description | Early measurable impact has been demonstrated with a request from one of our workshop hosts, UAL Short Courses, to include our workshop in their offer for the coming year. We regard it as a meaningful non-academic impact that content on religious dress at work will be incorporated in the annual offer of a significant commercial training provider - UAL short courses are taken by organisations and individuals across all sectors of the fashion industry and media, as well as in the culture industries more broadly. For all our host organisations our CPD certification scheme also contributed impact in elevating understanding of religion and belief as an organisational diversity priority. We discovered that the - often lengthy - process of collaborating with workshop hosts on how best to tailor our menu of learning outcomes for their organisation and sector was itself a route to enhancing understanding within organisation teams. Engagement with our project changed workplace staff development priorities, putting religion and belief more fully on the agenda by providing lively and accessible mechanisms for learning. Our impact on commercial organisational concepts of diversity and inclusion showed clearly in our Dubai delivery for a regional mall company. Here, workshop participants were enthusiastic to incorporate religion and dress - under the localised rubric of cultural dress - into their own in-house training provision. The corporation saw the ability to learn and apply selected insights as a key reason for hosting the workshop, and selected HR professionals to be among the participants. Cumulatively, these early signs of impact indicate progress in nucleating a new area of activity in the EDI field. This is extremely important in the UK particularly, where religion and belief remains often the least attended to of the UK Equality Act protected characteristics (with comparable context-specific benefits to be found in our Gulf setting). Challenges overcome to achieve impact include finding ways to circumnavigate anxieties about overtly discussing religion - with attention to how these vary in different sectors in the UK and for international workforces and in non-UK locations. Overall, the need to navigate these varied and connected concerns reinforced the value of fashion as a conduit for challenging, yet essential, discussions. Our project design tested and proved our supposition that visual elicitation techniques could be an effective mechanism for fostering these necessary and sensitive conversations. However, we also knew at the outset that working with visuals in the domain of religion and the body was a high-risk venture and so our employment of a graphic designer proved to be a wise investment in overcoming the specific challenges of lack of - appropriate or inoffensive - visuals in this area. Further impact was demonstrated in feedback from project partners, workshop host organizations, and workshop participants. Participants all reported an increase in understanding the role of religious dress in workplace relations, recruitment, and operational delivery, and demonstrated an increase in confidence in challenging discrimination based on religion or belief. This encourages us that we are moving forward in changing how religious dress is understood in the workplace and in community and interfaith dialogue. In the academic field, the experience of delivering this project has fed into a new AHRC grant proposal from PI and CI, currently under consideration. Continued interest from undergraduate, taught postgraduate, and research students, alongside requests to provide keynotes and conference papers, indicate a growing concentration of academic activity in our multi- and inter-disciplinary field of inquiry. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2022 |
| Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Education,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Retail,Other |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | British Council |
| Organisation | British Council |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | In response to advice from the British Council we were able to finetune our delivery plan for Dubai Expo. We provided copy for the British Council social media to promote our keynote and panel. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The British Council held a consultation meeting online with the project team and connected the team to their marketing colleagues in the Emirates. The marketing team helped promote the Dubai 2020 Expo events on their social media. Reductions in British Council funding and therefore staffing meant they were little able to promote the training workshop to participants, but they did promote the Expo events on social media. |
| Impact | Promotion of workshop, wider audience reach |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Sarum College |
| Organisation | Sarum College |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We created an extended three-hour in-person workshop that included more academic background and deeper discussion of the detail of workplace dress codes as part of a specifically-designed exercise to develop skills in policy review. As well as handouts, we created a reading list for participants ahead of the workshop. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Sarum College requested a long-form workshop and offered a workshop venue, overnight board for the CI and PI and access to their community of religious scholars. When it became clear to them that their entire programme based on live events was not recruiting because of the pandemic context, the workshop was cancelled. They had not made preparations for or secured the facilities to migrate delivery online. |
| Impact | Workshop design |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Dubai Keynote and Panel |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | PI Prof. Lewis delivered keynote speech "Cultural Heritage in Fashion: Contemporary Muslim Fashion" at the Women's Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020. Prof. Lewis also facilitated a panel discussion with Emirati designer Feryal Albastaki, author Hafsa Lodi and founder of The Zay Initiative Reem El Mutwalli. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Dubai Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The training workshop "Religion and Dress at Work - opportunities and pitfalls" took place in Dubai with the support of project partner the Zay Initiative. The workshop was hosted offline by a regional mall company who provided facilities in their training suite and worked with PI to select a group of 12 members of their senior leadership team. Led by PI and a project research assistant (substituting for project co-ordinator), the workshop deployed a range of specially designed participatory exercises including: visual elicitation, discussion of the language of modesty and shame, and scenario building to help participants explore how appearance and dress can impact on equality of employment opportunity. Exercises previously adjusted for online delivery during lockdown were reverse engineered for offline delivery and adjusted for the local context. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | UAL Short Courses |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The training workshop "Religion and Dress at Work - opportunities and pitfalls" was hosted online by UAL Short Courses, available to internal and external participants. Led by PI and CI, the workshop deployed a range of specially designed participatory exercises including: visual elicitation, discussion of the language of modesty and shame, and scenario building to help participants explore how appearance and dress can impact on equality of employment opportunity. Fourteen UAL staff members attended the workshop. Participants reported an increased awareness of the complexities of religious dress in the workplace. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Vogue Arabia - Daily round-up |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | Vogue Arabia promoted Prof. Lewis' keynote and panel in Dubai as part of their daily round-up of Expo highlights. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://en.vogue.me/fashion/indonesia-modest-fashion-day-contemporary-muslim-fashions-expo-2020-duba... |
| Description | Vogue Arabia - Feature |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | Following from their attention to the project's event at Dubai Expo, Vogue Arabia commissioned an article on modest fashion from Hafsa Lodi, who Prof. Lewis had recruited to the panel at the Women's Pavilion. The article appeared in Vogue Arabia's offline and online editions, and featured an interview with Prof. Lewis alongside interviews with leading modest fashion designers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://en.vogue.me/fashion/modest-fashion-global-importance-evolution-dulce-by-safiya-chador |
| Description | Workshop for Employee Resources Groups and Employee Networks |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The training workshop "Religion and Dress at Work - opportunities and pitfalls" was hosted by industry partner Impetus and Momentum (formerly Jeito Consulting), targeting an audience of Employee Resource Group and Employee Networks chairs and members. The event was widely advertised via Impetus and Momentum's LinkedIn platform. Led by PI and CI, the workshop deployed a range of specially designed participatory exercises including: visual elicitation, discussion of the language of modesty and shame, and scenario building to help participants explore how appearance and dress can impact on equality of employment opportunity. Five people, primarily based in the UK, attended the workshop. Participants reported an increased awareness of the complexities of religious dress in the workplace. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Workshop for Recruiters and EDI Leads |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The training workshop "Religion and Dress at Work - opportunities and pitfalls" was hosted by industry partner Impetus and Momentum (formerly Jeito Consulting), targeting an audience of Recruiters and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Leads. The event was widely advertised via Impetus and Momentum's LinkedIn platform. Led by PI and CI, the workshop deployed a range of specially designed participatory exercises including: visual elicitation, discussion of the language of modesty and shame, and scenario building to help participants explore how appearance and dress can impact on equality of employment opportunity. Nine people, primarily based in the UK, attended the workshop. Participants reported an increased awareness of the complexities of religious dress in the workplace. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |