Women's Issues

The Legality Of A Women-Only Club In The #MeToo Era

The Wing is exactly the space that so many women want, but it seems to be flouting public accommodations laws.

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(Photo via The Wing)

Here’s a question I can’t get out of my mind: What does Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who created this country’s legal framework for gender equality by bringing a series of lawsuits arguing the law discriminated against men, think of The Wing?

If you’re not familiar, The Wing is women-only social club and coworking space that started in New York in 2016 and is rapidly expanding to cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Toronto, and London. In Vogue this month, a reporter follows the cofounders around Paris as they look for a space for the company’s newest location.

The Wing also seems to be flouting standard public accommodations laws. As a company with more than 100 members, it is most likely in violation of New York Civil Rights Law § 40-C, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex “by any firm, corporation or institution.” The New York City Human Rights Commission opened an investigation into the company back in March. There are also laws against sex discrimination in California, where The Wing already has two locations, as well as Washington, Illinois, and Massachusetts, where The Wing will open locations by 2019. (Which is to say nothing of the question of what is the definition of a woman anyway.)

It is, by most accounts, a great place to both hang out and to work. According to Vogue, “[e]verything inside is designed to buoy one’s mood: The library (all books by or about women) is arranged into a rainbow by spine color, the plants are always green (they’re plastic), the Spotify playlists are peppy and familiar, and the language of the place is injected with moxie.” It has a packed roster of celebrity speakers — both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AND Hillary Clinton — a long waitlist for membership, and $42 million in venture funding.

As a woman who has had to work in spaces full of men, I see the appeal. Even if you don’t, the last year of #MeToo news gives you some idea of why a young generation of professional women might want a space in which to be left alone. The Wing opened at a cultural moment where young feminists are daring to suggest that they should have a basic right to exist free of harassment and abuse from men. ​T​here is a generational divide between the women who had to fight for their right to exist in the workplace at all​ — who​ couldn’t even begin to see a world where they didn’t have to endure some sexism and harassment to keep their place in it​ –​ and today’s young women who believe that simply being allowed to come to work is not enough.​ They believe they have a right to go out in public and not be bothered. The Wing is exactly the space that so many women want.

But The Wing also strikes me as a particularly privileged and ill-thought-out way of achieving that goal. It seems to operate by the Silicon Valley cliché “move fast and break things.” Maybe that’s okay when it comes to the taxi industry, but I’m not sure I’m okay with a company that goes for breaking civil rights law as a business model. I look at something like the recent bad faith internet mob that tried to get new New York Times hire Sarah Jeong fired for years-old jokes she made at the expense of white people (which were funny), and I wonder how The Wing responds when real money and power comes at them accusing them of discriminating against men. Entrenched power structures don’t act in good faith when they’re threatened. “Hey, men have nearly every public space in the world, maybe women could have a few” is unlikely to be the Fox News narrative. For as much support as I’ve seen for The Wing as a social concept, I’ve never seen a decent legal argument about its right to exist. If The Wing gets to be women only, what about whites-only coworking spaces? What do The Wing and its supporters think of the gay-exclusionary baker from the Masterpiece Cakeshop case? If corporations can exclude people because of sex, it follows that they should be able to exclude people because of sexual orientation, right?

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There is a faint hint that The Wing is already backing down from its purist women-only stance. A New York Times story back in March cited Wing co-founder Audrey Gelman describing membership as “for people who identify and live as women.” However, she told Vogue in this month’s interview that eventually selective memberships for men “could be a reality in the future.”

Shane Ferro is a law student and a former professional blogger. She is (obviously) a bleeding-heart public interest kid.

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