When a Woman's Hour panellist starts suggesting that women should be made to shave off their 'dirty' leg hair, I despair

The Dorchester tells all its female staff that they must have shaved their legs, even if they're wearing tights. Willoughby thinks that's reasonable, and compares women with unshaven legs to male employees turning up hungover after a big night out

Jenni Murray (pictured) debated with India Willoughby on the issue on Woman's Hour (BBC)

Recently, The Dorchester, a five-star luxury hotel on Park Lane in London, became the centre of controversy over its stringent dress code for female employees. If you missed it, the “Do” list included an instruction for female staff to “shave your legs (even if wearing tights)” and the “Don’t” list included forbidding female staff to “display any excess body hair, including the face.” Other instructions for female staff, many of whom earn £9 an hour, include, “wear full make-up,” and, “have regular manicures.”

The majority of reactions to this have been outrage, calling out the double standard and demanding to know why male staff aren’t held to such strict prescriptions on their appearances. Stylist called the list “a clear example of the sexism women face every day”. The Pool pointed out: “These women are going to work to do their job and earn money, not to parade around The Dorchester lobby like an over-preened Victoria’s Secret model.” And Loose Women guest panellist India Willoughby laughed off the idea that she would ever have been expected to shave her legs, prior to her transition from male to female. “What a bizarre question,” she said to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. “Why would I shave my legs when I was living as a man?”

“Exactly!” declared Murray, intending to bond with Willoughby over their shared disdain for the Dorchester’s sexist employment standards. But hang on – Murray had misunderstood. When it comes to women shaving their legs, Willoughby said, “I think it’s fair enough.” Explaining why, Willoughby likened women with leg hair to the great unwashed, who’ve dragged themselves out of the gutter to start their shift. She said: “Personally, I wouldn’t like to be served by somebody with hairy legs, grubby nails, dishevelled hair, and looking a bit worse for wear.” Because of course, women’s leg hair is synonymous with being dirty, and, as she continued, “for women, the expectation is that you do look clean.”

Must men shave their legs to “look clean”? Willoughby clarified: “I think, growing up as a man, the social expectations are that men don’t shave their legs.” Ah, so only women’s leg hair is a hotbed of filth – men’s is magically sanitary! However, Willoughby suggests that The Dorchester probably has standards for men too. She speculates that if male staff turn up for work “looking a bit rough after a heavy night out, then you’re going to be in trouble, you’re not going to be off the hook.”

Right! So a man turning up for work feeling tired and hungover, not fully functioning and possibly stinking of stale booze is the equivalent of a woman turning up for work without having shaved her legs? Glad we got that sorted.

As Murray points out, the leg-shaving question has been a political hot potato for some time. Prior to The Dorchester leak (and in no connection to it), columnist Emer O’Toole has pointed out that “the capitalist drive to convince us that female body hair is unnatural and unclean has been alarmingly successful.” O’Toole notes that it was only when Gillette's first razor for women came out in 1915, accompanied by aggressive advertising campaigns, that female body hair was suddenly deemed unsightly.

Other feminist commentators agree. Laurie Penny notes: “Cultural disgust for the female body is deeply political… If the female body remains a beautiful mystery, if it remains an ethereal, abstract quantity, you don’t have to feel so bad when you do bad things to it.” She adds that leg-shaving and the like is “a lot of fun right up until it becomes compulsory, until you have to do it to prove you're a real woman, a good employee, a person worthy of love and affection.” Paris Lees says similarly: “It's when it becomes compulsory that we start to get mad. Show me a woman who hasn't sat in the bath shaving her legs idly daydreaming of a world where she doesn't have to.”

The point here is not that women shouldn’t shave their legs, but that they shouldn’t be forced to, any more than men. Contrary to tropes invented by those attempting to sell razors to women, female leg hair isn’t dirty – and nor is it equivalent to dirty fingernails or looking worse for wear after a night out.

I expect better from an international brand like The Dorchester – and I’d usually expect better from guests on Woman’s Hour as well.