Banning women from wearing high heels: Evening Standard corrects story

Credit where credit’s due: the Evening Standard was one of the media outlets which ran pieces wrongly reporting the TUC as wanting to ban high heels. So I pinged an email of complaint over to them, pointing out that in fact the TUC only wanted to ban the wearing of high heels being made mandatory by some employers. I got this response:

It’s true that the context for the motion, proposed by the Society Chiropodists and Podiatrists, was employers who have dress codes that mandate high heels for women, but the short version of motion as passed was simply that “high heels… are completely inappropriate for the day-to-day working environment,” and the tenor of the debate – as indicated by the quotes used by our columnist – was hostile to high heels generally. It was this that she was primarily responding to (indeed the tone of the motion and debate provoked similar reactions from columnists in the Independent on Sunday, Guardian and elsewhere.) However, I will ensure that the context of the motion is made clear in our archived and internet versions.

And indeed, the story that I had spotted has now been updated to read:

Unwittingly I had strayed into a war zone: this week the TUC said it would like to see heels, which it terms “sexist” and “inappropriate”, outlawed in employers’ dress codes.

Result.