At the start of every recruitment “party” at every house, three perfectly polished girls in identical outfits emerge from the door, holding hands, and introduce themselves. Through the entrance, you can see the rest of the sorority’s members chanting softly, also wearing matching clothes and a bright, seemingly permanent smile. As a Potential New Member (PNM), the scene feels like a freaky reenactment of the “It’s A Small World” ride at Disney. You immediately question why you volunteered to participate in this process and contemplate fleeing… until you realize that the idyllic warmth and polished uniformity is the standard at every last house. 

In fact, maintaining uniformity is how a sorority makes a good initial impression to PNMs during rush. The process starts during the beginning of summer, when officers and advisors in charge of the recruitment process prepare a list of attire that all members participating in formal recruitment must purchase. During the (hellish) week before recruitment, when all members return to campus early to participate in “rush school,” their wardrobe is assessed to make sure that the clothing is flattering on their individual bodies and that they appear uniform all together. If one or more items are not approved, the woman must replace them in time to have them checked and worn for rush week. 

I personally struggled with finding clothes that met the criteria in shades and silhouettes that complemented my body, and that I thought I would wear again. What is more, though I did find items that seemed as though they would be approved, during dress check, I found that many outfits were objected to because they were not the exact shade that the recruitment team had envisioned.

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Those women were advised to look at what their sisters were wearing and purchase the same thing. Except a shade and silhouette that flattered one woman’s body might not look so appealing on another’s. Women who aren’t tall, slender and white are already intimately familiar with the struggle to find clothes that look good on their “specific body type” (as if being slightly darker or curvier should be considered deviant) as well as to consult resources in their surroundings and online that can accurately show how a garment might look on their own body. This under-representation of “variant” body types presents particular difficulties at a time when online shopping is so ubiquitous: I send back so many things I buy online because they didn’t look how they were “supposed” to on my body, as they did on the body of the model on the screen.

For those women, it seemed that they were being asked to compromise on their own comfort and self-confidence for the sake of uniformity. When I suggested to an officer that it might be more beneficial to the recruiting process if each individual member was dressed to display the best version of herself, she responded with “I just want everyone to look good.”

To me, that simple statement carried with it many exclusionary assumptions. It was obvious to me that “looking good” necessitated that every sister fit into a mold which, inspired by an institution comprised of predominantly thin, white bodies, accommodated certain women much more easily than it did others. Though the house as a whole would “look good” should everyone dress perfectly alike, only the women for whom the mold was actually made could show off the best version of themselves. Everyone else would simply have to make do. 

Recruitment is a process that encourages sorority women to look uniform, but to be different. We are encouraged to show off our unique personalities and talents to PNMs and have those qualities reflect on the character of the whole house. What officially ties us together are our values, which transcend demographic identifiers and demonstrate to PNMs that their ability to identify with these values is how their compatibility with the sorority will be assessed.

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But unofficially, uniformity is also key to successful recruitment. It matters to the PNMs when they decide which houses they want to return to for later rounds, and because rush is a mutual selection process, what matters to them must also matter to the sororities. As much as they try to impress us with their academic history and community service record, we must also cater to their desires - to have the few women they actually speak to be unique and interesting, but still appear to accurately reflect the entire sisterhood that they’re considering joining. That makes sense; it would be unfortunate for a PNM to choose a house because she had an incredible connection with one or two women, only to find that a majority of her sisters are very different from her. A PNM must extrapolate a potential lifetime connection to an entire house from a few individual interactions during the short, stressful six-day period she has to find her home - and that’s pretty difficult to do if the women she meets are “too different.” 

In the first two rounds, when the duration of each party is short and conversations are still very “surface-level,” the impressions that a PNM leaves with are based as much on what she sees as what is said. Uniformity in dress is a good recruitment strategy in that it makes a group of non-identical bodies appear more physically cohesive so that even if a PNM meets women who have very different personalities and backgrounds, she can still think of the house as a homogeneous unit. The process of recruitment, then, seems to reward sororities whose members have very similar profiles, one that matches the profile of the historically “typical” PNM pool: white, slender, tall, and usually upper-middle class. 

Although indicators of socioeconomic status, which are readily conveyed through conversation affect initial impressions just as heavily, I place so much weight on physical attributes because appearances do determine how comfortable a fresh-faced PNM feels upon walking into a room of strangers with whom she is expected to form connections. That’s not to say that anyone is intentionally prejudiced - our minds have a natural tendency to categorize and empathize with people based on how alike to ourselves they are. The typical PNM, then, would initially feel much more at home at a sorority made up of other white women whom she sees wearing the same David Yurman bracelet and Michael Kors watch that are normally seen in her usual social circle, than she would upon walking into a more diverse sorority whose members do not display the physical attributes and ornaments that she identifies with.

But in my own rush experience, as both a PNM and an active, costuming myself to appear "typical" with expensive looking clothes and conspicuously branded jewelry can only take me so far with the homogeneous, highly selective sororities and the classic PNM. At some point, I realized that connecting over our shopping habits at Nordstrom and our favorite jewelry at Tiffany & Co. can only take me so far with a woman who isn’t "racially diverse" herself - because although she can see us being friends, she can’t see us alongside each other as sisters, having a relationship that transcends ordinary friendship. 

A sisterhood can only be so diverse if the process that is the lifeblood of every chapter hinges on those first impressions that have so much less to do with whom we have grown to become than what we look like and where we come from, despite all claims that the former is what we actually look for in each other. By strengthening sisterhoods of women who are demographically similar, the traditional recruitment process actually engenders loss of diversity. 

The Greek system can’t offer every woman an equal opportunity to find her home away from home if immediately upon walking into a house as a PNM, someone who doesn’t fit the "typical" sorority girl profile feels excluded because so few members of that sorority can relate to her. For a genuine, supportive sisterhood to be accessible to every woman who desires it, both sorority women and PNMs should more strongly value the possibility of gaining unique, colorful experiences with their new sisters and not gravitate too quickly to the familiar.

"Sorority Rows" is a three-part series on sorority recruitment and membership at USC, published as part of the regularly running column, "Unpopular Opinions." Read more "Unpopular Opinions" here. Contact Columnist Ashley Yang here; or follow her on Twitter.