How do I look?

At the Golden Globe Awards this year Demi Moore took the stage to accept her award and declared:

'I'll just leave you with one thing that this movie is imparting, [which] is, in those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough, or pretty enough, or skinny enough, or successful enough, or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’

But why do we always want to look different?

Why do we question whether we are enough?

Why do we feel the need to conform to unattainable standards of beauty or perfection as a way to feel validated or feel complete?

To look into into this in more detail I was joined this week on the podcast by Dr Amy Diehl to discuss the subject of 'Lookism' and 'Appearance Bias'. Amy's work explores the reasons why we feel the need to conform to certain societal standards to gain acceptance (particularly in the workplace) and also uncovers the reality that on more occasions than we would like to believe people are getting judged not on their ability but on the way they look.

It's 2025 and we are still stuck in a situation which is pretty problematic.

What Amy uncovered through her work is that actually 'lookism' is exactly what Demi has called out in her speech - it is any way that people choose to discriminate and all the ways we then choose to punish ourselves for not being enough - or even worse for being too much.

'We started to look at different ways that women's identity characteristics were impacting them. And what we found to summarise is that almost any identity characteristic about a woman can be used as an excuse to discriminate against her...what was interesting about lookism is that it is traditionally defined as a beauty bias...however we found in our research that for women it didn't matter what the women look like, whether they were perceived to be attractive or unattractive, whether they were tall, whether they were short, whether they were perceived to be overweight or perceived to be thin, whatever type of clothing they were wearing...no matter what a woman was, it was just another way that she could be criticised or actively discriminated against.'

What's important is that Amy shares how organisations can put the work in to call out instances of lookism and to remove it from the culture. She also gives clear guidance on how to anticipate and mitigate situations where lookism arises and how to handle tricky situations.

In reality we will all have suffered lookism at some point and just after the podcast went live I was contacted with a number of messages where people shared their experiences including:

'(As blondes) a woman at work used to refer to us as “dumb, dumber and dumberer”. We used to transcribe books into braille...we definitely weren’t stupid - that was purely based on how we looked'

Listen here to the full conversation with Amy:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7cBBe7gGo39AlGWyyJbIyS?si=_GUwHum4RSO_lNwiZ_iFJg

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/season-7-episode-3-lookism-and-why-it-is-pretty/id1725889381?i=1000684339735

I really want to flip this on it's head and find a positive and I am going to do that through Stressed But Well Dressed. How we look and how we show ourselves to the world is how we demonstrate our identity. However we look, whatever we choose to wear, we should find the confidence to feel good in our own skin, to feel comfortable as we are and to take the advice of the legendary Demi Moore we should just find a way to 'put down the measuring stick'.

So on that note, have a great weekend and do yourself a favour and put down the measuring stick.

Dahlia x