Women who live in California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana can thank our government for making it legal for an employer to fire women who don’t wear makeup if that employer decides that makeup is a part of the company uniform. According to a federal appeals court ruling, reports Liz Benston of the Las Vegas Sun, it has been ruled legally possible for a Nevada casino company to “impose makeup requirements on its female bartenders without violating U.S. sex discrimination laws.”

Darlene Jespersen, who had been fired in 2000 from her bartending job at Harrah’s in Reno for “failing to follow a grooming policy for beverage servers,” intends to bring the case to a superior court. Judge Edward Reed of Reno explained that Harrah’s grooming policy “did not constitute sex discrimination because it imposed equal burdens on both sexes.”

In case this ruling is still unclear, writer Anne Newitz spells it out in an article posted on Alternet.org:

“Think this through slowly and carefully, girls: if you live in the 9th Circuit … you could be fired tomorrow if your boss decides your ‘uniform’ for work includes makeup. Supposedly this ruling doesn’t run afoul of discrimination law because it doesn’t impose an ‘unequal burden’ on women … [A] rule for women enforcing face paint is ‘equal’ to a rule forbidding men from wearing it. Now there’s some real smart logic. Presence is the same as absence! War is peace! Yup, it’s the kind of analysis that’s gotten very popular in the United States recently.”

The implications of this logic are priceless. Newitz continues,

“Never again is anyone allowed to give me crap about how women naturally want to adorn themselves with makeup, as if there’s some genetic urge to look fake that’s wended its way here on the sparkly pink path of evolution. This ain’t biology … This is some cosmetics executive getting rich on state-enforced gender norms.”

It’s not about whether women are degraded by wearing makeup, Newitz argues. Rather, the question is “whether women who are forced to wear makeup when men aren’t can be described as experiencing gender equality.” Evidently the 9th Circuit admitted that makeup costs both money and time, only to dismiss this fact as ‘academic.’ Newitz questions:

“But if these costs are so insignificant, why not require Harrah’s to pay to keep its female employees looking as if they’d just had a makeover?

Indeed. Here’s another theoretical question: how much makeup would it take to disguise the intentions of a government which leaves a path of illogic in its wake?