If you work at Citibank, the answer would apparently be yes, according to Debrahlee Lorenzana, who is suing the bank on the grounds that it fired her for being really good looking. So good looking, apparently, that it distracted them from the hard work they were doing at Citi and had to be stopped. Her boss Craig Fisher and one of his colleagues tried to make her less hot, allegedly, by pulling Lorenzana into an office one day and telling her she had to stop wearing turtlenecks, pencil skirts, three inch heels or “fitted” business suits. When Lorenzana brought up the matter of other females wearing way more revealing clothes, she was told those women’s shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention.” Lorenzana like this was kind of a bunch of bull shit (“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Lorenzana recalls. “I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ I was like, ‘Too distracting? For who? For you? My clients don’t seem to have any problem’) so she decided not to change her wardrobe but rather fug herself up a bit by not wearing make-up and not blowing out her hair. She also wrote a couple letters to HR letting them know she was not pleased with how the meeting went but never heard back and her attempts to downplay how hot she was didn’t work either.
“I could have worn a paper bag, and it would not have mattered,” she says. “If it wasn’t my shirt, it was my pants. If it wasn’t my pants, it was my shoes. They picked on me every single day.” Still, she continued to dress up for work—her brand of femininity is also cultural. “Where I’m from,” she says, switching into Spanish to explain it, “women dress up—like put on makeup and do their nails—to go to the supermarket. And I’m not talking trashy, you know, like in the Heights. I was raised very Latin, you know? We’re feminine. A woman in Puerto Rico takes care of herself. The Puerto Rican women here put down our flag.”
