Corporate America demanded heels as proof you belonged in the room. Decades later, more than our feet are paying the bill.
Some women left corporate America with stock options. I left with plantar fasciitis.
I worked in corporate sales in New York City during the go-go ’80s. Women were expected to wear heels. It was just part of the uniform.
I searched in vain for a pump that would stay on my narrow feet without crushing my toes. Impossible. I settled for slingbacks, and I pounded the pavement in those babies until I bled. We may have worn Reeboks while commuting on the subway, but we threw them in our lower desk drawers and slipped on the heels before our first meeting.
Until one day, one of my arches collapsed. The pain was unbearable. The podiatrist told me that, in my 20s, I’d already lost the fat pad on the balls of my feet.
But give up heels? Ridiculous.
The Original Power Shoe
Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw could trace her Christian Louboutins back to Louis XIV. The French monarch wore red-soled high heels, and only aristocrats with his permission could do the same. On special occasions, the king’s heels were ornamented with hand-painted scenes of his military victories, showing he could crush his enemies underfoot.
By the 18th century, heels were almost entirely women’s. Taller, thinner, and built for a different job—lengthening the leg, tilting the hips, catching the male gaze. On a man, wearing heels had said, “I have power.” On a woman, it said, “I’m sexually desirable.”
Aren’t we lucky.
The Institutionalization of Pain
June Cleaver famously vacuumed her carpets in them. By the time boomer women flooded corporate America in the 1980s, “professional footwear” and “business-appropriate attire” became a standard that could make or break a career.
We took the shoe that once signaled dominance and wore it to ask permission.
Shana Ayabe spent more than a decade as a senior marketing executive in asset management before founding Grace Media Digital. She describes the pressure to wear heels as a “beauty tax.”
“The standard is universally understood: blowout, makeup, chic clothing, a proper bag, and heels—the higher the better,” she said. “At senior levels, add designer labels.” The signal was clear: Look like you belong, or be dismissed before you open your mouth.
The first person who told Ayabe to wear heels was her mother, a secretary at a law firm—that’s how the standard traveled, woman to woman, generation to generation.
But it was the men who made it clear, through who got promoted and who got sidelined, what happened when you didn’t follow the rules. Too polished and you were a climber; not polished enough and you were unserious.
Ayabe wore heels to the office every day for seven years.
“They became the foundation of my professional identity,” she said. “It meant I knew the rules of the game and I was there to play. It was the secret password to get through the door.”
When she appears in videos for her company wearing heels and a suit, her content consistently performs better. The data, she said, doesn’t lie.
Madness? Or Masochism?
The 20th anniversary of The Devil Wears Prada is everywhere right now, and front and center on all the promotional materials are those iconic five-inch red stilettos. Two decades later, and we can’t look away, because the power those stilettos represent is real. We feel it.
The problem was never the heel itself. It was what the culture demanded of us: extreme heights, shoes narrowed to a point, worn without support, day after day for decades. We know what these shoes do to us. We’ve always known. But we still do it anyway, to claim our power or to live up to men’s definition of sexy.
Somewhere along the way, authority and sex appeal got tangled—until we couldn’t separate what we were doing for ourselves from what we were doing for them.
The Bill Comes Due
Our bodies work incredibly hard to conform as we cram our feet into Barbie-like positions, adjusting bones and soft tissue. Over the years, the damage becomes pathology: bunions; hammertoes; chronic foot, hip, and back pain. The Achilles tendon and calf muscles shorten.
Midlife is the turning point, not because heels suddenly become harmful, but because the body can no longer compensate. Hormonal shifts only accelerate it—less elasticity, slower recovery, a body that’s done absorbing punishment without complaint.
And now? We’ve reached the point where some women use foot numbing spray to get through special events. A product designed to chemically remove sensation from your feet so you can stop hearing your body scream.
Someone identified our willingness to suffer and built a business around it.
The Doctor Will See You Now
Dr. Samantha Landau is a biomechanics-focused podiatrist, professor at Touro New York College of Podiatric Medicine, and director of its Gait Lab. She’s seen it all. Women who force their feet into heels for years, finally submit to surgery, and are back in pumps practically before the stitches are out.
“A lot of times they’re in agony,” Landau said. “Some people think surgery allows them to wear high heels. It just corrects the deformity.”
Here’s what I didn’t expect: Dr. Landau herself still wears heels. Every day. But she’s quick to clarify: This isn’t a contradiction. Her own heels are lower and wider. When she wants to wear higher heels, she uses custom orthotics that she also designs for her patients. The counterintuitive part? Flats aren’t the answer, either. A little heel, she’ll tell you, is actually better for most feet than none at all. Landau wears heels because she knows how to do it without destroying her feet. The irony is that most of us never did.
I’m No Cinderella
In my case, my ankle instability built up over time, causing a couple of sudden falls around age 60—even while wearing flats. My ankle never fully recovered, despite more than a year of physical therapy. Now, I’m nervous about any movement requiring a side-to-side pivot. Dancing. Stepping off a platform in an exercise class. Things I didn’t think twice about before.
Having to be so conscious of every step I take makes me feel old, but I don’t have much of a choice anymore. My feet are so bad, I sometimes get blisters under my calluses. When I get a pedicure, it’s not for vanity’s sake, but to be able to wear shoes comfortably at all.
Instead of searching for heels, I’m on a never-ending hunt for comfortable shoes that don’t make me look and feel like my grandmother. Many of us have simply run out of options. For others, you’ll have to pry those heels from their cold, dead feet.
“Until society rewrites the dress code,” Ayabe said, “I will continue to wear my red bottoms into every room where business gets done.”
Louis XIV wore those red-soled shoes to show he could crush his enemies. We’ve spent decades crushing ourselves for the privilege of being taken seriously. At some point—at 55, at 60, when the body is done negotiating and the surgery looms—we have to ask:
What exactly are we still proving, and to whom?
