The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
The New York’s Human Rights Commission is investigating a claim that The Wing, a private club founded in 2016 as a work space and networking hub exclusively for women, violates the city’s anti-discrimination law by barring men.
Can we have NOTHING that is our own? It's not enough that men are demanding access to our restrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, etc. on the mere claim of being female.
The whole point of The Wing is to provide a space where women can work and network without having to worry about things like sexual harassment or discrimination. The Wing was created as a modern take on the women's clubs of the 19th and early 20th centuries that enabled women to organize for the right to vote and more. In those days, most public organizations and spaces excluded women and women were often forbidden to go out in public without a male chaperone. While formal exclusion of women from public places is less common today, most accommodations are still majority-male and almost all are run by men to this very day, and there exists a sense that said situation is no longer growing more equitable. To judge by the fact that The Wing has had a waiting list since before the first branch opened its doors two years ago and also by the fact that they are adding new branches outside of New York City, clearly there is high demand for such private, safe spaces for women. If men are allowed in, the entire purpose is defeated!
In the UK, they have such a concept as positive discrimination, which is legal, to protect institutions similar to this that are exclusionary of groups that, more largely, are socially dominant in order to move society closer to a place of equitable treatment overall. Clearly we need to recognize the validity of that concept here!
The University of Vermont -- the place where I attended college -- hosted a women-only debate tournament this weekend to give women a break from the sexism they often experience in mixed debates:
Organizers hope to keep the tournament an annual event. How long can it last before discrimination against men is disingenuously claimed?"There is also a lot of sexual predation that happens in the debate community," said UVM debate director Helen Morgan-Parmett. "The tournament, I think, provides a safe space where people feel they are debating other women, and their bodies aren't necessarily on display."
College debating is one of the few intercollegiate competitive activities in which women and men compete directly against one another. While some women do win, the debaters say they have to be that much better than men to overcome bias on the part of many judges. And they point to statistics that show they are less likely to reach the top echelons of the activity.
"Like with a lot of collegiate activities, debate has a tendency to be male-dominated," said UVM sophomore debater Miranda Zigler, of Boston.
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Originally Posted by IMPress Polly
