The Infamous Rules for Women on Fox News Are Changing. You Just Have to Know Where to Look. (2024)

This is part ofSly as Fox, a short series about the perils of underestimating Fox News in 2024.

You probably know all about the “leg cam.” Fox News’ penchant for angles that highlight the alluring lower limbs of its female hosts was first reported more than 10 years ago, just one of the myriad ways the conservative network commodified its women.

Some things have changed since then. Roger Ailes, the man who allegedly built Fox News into the sort of place where ogling women’s legs was encouraged, was ousted from the network in 2016, amid allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct from more than 20 women. Fox News had always been chauvinist, but the Ailes debacle revealed how this attitude infused the network as a workplace too. It wasn’t long before Hollywood turned the whole thing into a movie, 2019’s Bombshell. These days, if you tune intoThe Five, you might notice co-host Jeanine Pirro sitting in the so-called “legs seat”—but she almost always wears pants, not a short skirt.

And yet the leg cam hasn’t died. The panel show Outnumbered, for instance, frequently features unencumbered views of all three of its female hosts’ legs in short skirts. (Each day, they are joined by one male guest panelist, aka “#OneLuckyGuy”—their words, of course.) Overall, in the years since the network’s sexism became a national topic of discussion, Fox News’ beauty standards for its female hosts haven’t changed all that much.

Historically, the Fox News woman has been traditionally feminine, with a hint, or sometimes more than a hint, of sex appeal. Think painstakingly blown-out hair, usually blond, and form-fitting dresses. As Dan Cassino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the author of Fox News and American Politics, told me, the idea is that “you don’t have to worry with these women. They are going to be sexy, but they are also not gonna be threatening to you. We’re not threatening the patriarchy in any way here.”

Reece Peck, a professor at the College of Staten Island and the author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class, agreed but thinks there’s more to it: “There’s a kind of an Erin Brockovich vibe, where being girly is kind of a badge of ordinariness.” Fox News anchors, in other words, feel relatable if aspirational to the network’s female audience watching at home.

For years, the ultimate relatable-if-aspirational quality for this segment of the population has been the blond hair. Fox News practically invented the archetype of the conservative blond woman, for whom flaxen hair is, as New York magazine once put it, “a dog whistle of whiteness, an unspoken declaration of values, a wink-wink to the power of racial privilege.” If you want to look for hints of change at the network, you might observe that in addition to wearing pants, another thing women there seem to be allowed to do with slightly more frequency now is … have hair that’s a color other than blond. Peck told me that he thinks the network is subtly moving away from the “hyperwhite, country music, girl-next-door, heartland” look that it once more firmly favored. There have always been brunettes, but he has noticed more of them—one prominent example is Outnumbered’s Emily Compagno—and more diversity in general: more Hispanic women, particularly Cubans, such as Sara Carter, and more “white ethnics, like Italians,” he said. “It fits where the conservative movement has been headed.” But there are still plenty of traditional Fox News blondes to be found, between prominent hosts like Ainsley Earhardt, of Fox & Friends, and newer contributors like Nicole Parker, a former FBI agent who joined the network this year to provide law enforcement analysis.

An infatuation with blondness isn’t just a Fox News thing, it should be noted, and all television news programs make it their business to hire attractive on-air talent. At Fox, though, there’s a way of taking things to extremes. On this point, Peck told me he suspects that there are more former pageant winners and models among Fox News personalities than there are at other networks—like onetime Miss Minnesota Lauren Green (now Fox’s chief religion correspondent) or Miss Missouri 2010, Ashley Strohmier (an overnight anchor).

Experts pointed out that while there may be some rules and top-down edicts about how to look and dress on air, it’s also just as likely that these codes are self-perpetuating to some degree. At a place like Fox News, “I don’t have to bring in women I have to force to dress a certain way,” Cassino said, inhabiting the mindset of a network executive. “I hire women because they dress a certain way. And so after I’m gone they keep on dressing that way anyway.”

Stefanie Davis Kempton, a professor at Penn State Altoona and a former television journalist (though not for Fox), told me, “When you’re working and you have these goals of moving up, you are going to try to emulate the people who you want to be like. So if you want to work for MSNBC, you’re going to watch MSNBC. You’re going to absorb what they do. If your goal is to work for Fox News, you’re going to do the same thing.”

That may partly explain why, like the shift in acceptable hair colors, Fox’s embrace of pants has been subtle too. Cassino said that in his view, the Fox News women haven’t caught up to the pantsed masses at the other networks. “When you watch CNN or MSNBC, you are much more likely to see women wearing suits, wearing pants, wearing jackets,” he said. On the other networks, “we don’t see nearly the frequency of women wearing the midlength dresses. There is a very much an aesthetic difference.” And when pants are seen on Fox, sexy footwear may accompany them, Cassino added. “They are paired inevitably with very high heels.”

Wardrobe-wise, the sheath dress in particular has reigned over TV news for the past decade or so, a swing of the pendulum away from a previous era, in the ’80s and ’90s, of blazers and androgyny. And on Fox News, the sheath dress tends to be ever-so-slightly sexier than it is on other networks—Peck said he has seen the women’s clothing on the network described as “somewhere between the club and professional attire.”

The other rule of dressing like a Fox News woman seems to be wearing lots of color, frequently solid color, which is thought to play well on camera. This means “lots of pastels, lots of jewel tones, lots of very bright colors,” Cassino said—but the same isn’t true of the men on screen. For men, “even their ties are very red, blue, gray.” When a woman wears a bright color, he went on, “it is saying to you, This is not a masculine color. This is not a black or a gray or a dark blue, which are serious colors. So I am not threatening because I’m not being that serious.”

There can be a more direct message in the accessories. Women’s jewelry sometimes seems more prominent on Fox News than it does on other networks, and cross necklaces are much more common. “Laura Ingraham started that, I think, but yeah, they all do that,” Peck said. “It’s the Christian signaling. That’s such a perfect symbol of the contradictions where, on one hand, you are engaging in hedonism with this more sexualized style. On the other hand, you’re saying it’s in the service of Christian morality.” If not crosses, large statement jewelry frequently adorns hosts’ ears and necks, where it can stand out on camera and further emphasize the femininity of the women wearing it.

In makeup, Fox News seems to take a more-is-more philosophy too. Vincenza Carovillano worked at Fox News as a makeup artist for 12 years, both before and after the end of the Ailes era. “The one thing that I could say across the board that I definitely brought to all the women I worked with at Fox is glam,” she told me, recalling that she would add highlighter, gloss, and lashes, anything to give women’s face that extra pop.

“With regular news, they can stick to more of a corporate look,” she said, though she does think other networks are getting increasingly comfortable with more glam. Fox may be getting a little, tiny bit like the other networks, while the rest of the world gets a little more Fox-y.

Cassino observed that Fox News women tend to be in full-glam makeup no matter the time of day or program, whereas on other networks, it’s more context dependent. “What’s interesting about it is that we don’t get a gradation of makeup from the morning into the evening parts,” he said. “The sort of makeup you get on morning TV is different than what you normally see on evening TV. We’re going to have more makeup in the morning, and we’re going to kind of be more serious and less makeup in the evening.” On Fox News, though, it’s always glam o’clock. Be that as it may, at least now the women do get to wear pants once in a while.