I want to applaud the schools that have added shorts and pants options for their female students. Thank you for listening to your communities. Thank you for placing student welfare on the top of your priorities. 

The public school my children attend currently doesn't have a shorts option for girls in summer, nor a pants option in the colder winter months.

While many parents and young girls I talk to would love these options, there are concerns from other parents about a drop in the standard of presentation – “it just doesn't looks as good”.

Are we really comfortable with implying to the young leaders of tomorrow that the single most important factor in considering what a girl wears is not functionality and comfort, but appearance? 

Personally, I cannot understand that we have reached 2018 and we are still at a point where parents have to plead with schools so their daughters can be as warm as the boys in winter and physically active as the boys in summer. 

We ask for a pants option in winter so the girls with asthma that gets worse when they are cold, can be warm enough and well enough for class.

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We ask so that we don't have to pay double the amount of the price of boys pants for a long winter skirt or pinafore, only to end up with an outfit that girls still can't climb the monkey bars in.

We ask for shorts so that the girls who save handstand days for sports day can have handstand days every day.

We ask for shorts so that the older girls with a curvier build don't have to worry about classmates inadvertently looking up their skirts and commenting on the size of their thighs (this actually happened to a primary student I was talking to). 

Are we really asking for too much?