Men in skirts
No, not kilts mind you, skirts! When Arriva, the UK based public transport company. forbid their employed male train drivers to wear shorts, the men retaliated by coming to work in women's skirts. Long pants are too hot to wear in the summer, the male train drivers say, and skirts seem the only solution, and now a number of male drivers on the Roslagsbanan wear them. “What’s it like to wear a skirt? ‘Comfortable’ is a good way to describe it, a great alternative in the heat,” says Martin Åkersten, one of the drivers. Åkersten and a number of his colleagues were given green light two weeks ago from their boss to collect skirts from Arriva, the company that runs the train commissioned by SL.
“We were 13 at first. Today some more drivers picked up the skirts. Even some conductors,” says Åkersten. Last fall the issue of shorts as an alternative to pants were up for discussion at a meeting, but the employer said no – shorts were not deemed proper. It was either pants or skirts, and, for reasons that may be attributed to political correctness, green light was given for men to wear skirts. “No passengers have commented on me wearing a skirt, but a few have given me an extra look,” Åkersten adds.