Pressing Their Case : What Women Can Wear Is the Issue

Eight Democratic assemblywomen, most wearing slacks or pantsuits, marched from the Assembly chamber to the Senate on Thursday to dramatize their support for a bill to assure the right of California women to wear pants in the workplace.

The bill (AB 3672) was defeated twice this week in the Senate after being approved in the Assembly.

They immediately picked up the support of Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) and Assembly Speaker Willie

Brown (D-San Francisco), who promised to use their considerable influence to enact such a law.

The bill would make it illegal for an employer to prohibit a woman from wearing pants on the job.

Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) and members of the legislative Women’s Caucus demanded that the bill be resurrected and selected today, Women’s Equality Day, as the day for doing so.

Watson told reporters, “The issue is bigger than just wearing pants. It goes to our basic right to choose and not be discriminated against because of our sex.”

The bill’s author, Assemblywoman Diane Martinez (D-Monterey Park), said she introduced the measure at the request of a woman who wrote a letter complaining that “her employer ordered her to go home because she was wearing pants in the office.”

Martinez said she researched the law and found that there was nothing stopping an employer from requiring women to wear dresses and skirts at work. She said she introduced the bill believing that it would be “a simple little thing that would just go sliding through. I thought it was a slam-dunk.”

It cleared the Assembly and got through two Senate committees before encountering resistance in the full Senate, including opposition from three of five women senators. It was also opposed by the California Manufacturers Assn. and General Telephone and Electric. They said it would impinge on their rights to set dress standards.

It first failed on a 19-16 vote against the bill Monday, five short of the 21 required for passage. Watson tried again for passage Wednesday, but failed for lack of one favorable vote, 20-16.

Nineteen Democrats and one Republican, Sen. Tom Campbell of Stanford, voted for the bill; 14 Republicans and two independents voted against it; four other members did not vote.

Sens. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) and Lucy Killea (I-San Diego) voted against the bill. Bergeson and Wright said Thursday that they believed the bill unnecessarily interfered with an employer’s right to establish proper dress standards.

Killea said she considered the whole matter a non-issue. “The bill trivializes what we (women) are doing and the successes we are having,” she said. “This is the kind of thing we had to do in the 1970s. It isn’t a great societal problem.”