The United States Court of Appeal for the Eleventh Circuit has ruled that employers may ban employees from wearing the dreadlocks hairstyle. The lawsuit had been backed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because it related to a policy that appeared to be racially biased. However, the court held that hairstyle is a mutable physical trait that can be changed, unlike many other immutable physical characteristics such as skin colour.Therefore, a general hairstyle policy, that applied equally to all employees in a company, did not give rise to discrimination if it happened to exclude hairstyles favoured by certain ethnic groups.