Japanese women told to take off their glasses in the workplace

As absurd or 1950s as it sounds, women across various work sectors in Japan are being told to take off their glasses. The hashtag “glasses are forbidden (#メガネ禁止) began trending Wednesday in the wake of a Nippon TV program revealing that employers from airlines to department stores are regulating women’s eyewear.

Whether it’s for so-called safety reasons or ridiculous ones like the fact that glasses obscure makeup or “don’t go” with traditional Japanese dress—or even that women working in stores “appear cold” behind them—women are fed up and speaking out. And, while the “ban” may sound farcical, this kind of sexism is dangerous, leading to inferior treatment of women or even unemployment.

“If the rules prohibit only women to wear glasses, this is a discrimination against women,” Kanae Doi, the Japan director at Human Rights Watch, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation today.

The glasses protest is only the latest recent uprising against sexist norms in Japan. The country has a long history of dictating women’s dress in the workplace. In June, an actor named Yumi Ishikara created the hashtag #KuToo in response to another sexist workplace dress code: forcing women to wear heels at work. Kutsu means “shoe” and kutsuu means “pain,” thereby creating a pun that also plays on the #MeToo movement. Ishikawa took to Twitter after being required to wear heels while working at a funeral home, BBC reported. She started a petition to ban the ban. So far, it has garnered 31,000 signatures.

In June 2018, Japanese media reported that a medical school there had been lowering women’s test scores on its entrance exam in order to admit more men, also sparking a backlash.

“The government of Japan has legal obligations under international human rights standards to eliminate discrimination against women and girls and guarantee equality, including in the fields of education and employment,” Hiroka Shoji, an Amnesty International East Asia researcher wrote after the medical school scandal. “It is also obliged to take all appropriate measures to modify social and cultural beliefs and patterns to eliminate practices that are based either on ideas of the inferiority or the superiority of either sex, or on gender stereotypes.”

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has promised in the past to increase women’s participation in the workforce (referred to in shorthand as “womenomics”), however, Japan still lags behind other developed countries—a problem that has been attributed to hiring practices and the long hours often expected of employees, not to mention anachronistic and sexist regulations about how women look.

As #GlassesAreForbidden has continued to spread, women are sharing photos of their glasses on social media, with one tweeting, “Isn’t it so troublesome when you can see all the middle-aged men in the world?”