Reader Views on Gender-Divided Social Spaces
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked for your thoughts on all-male and all-female social spaces.
Replies have been edited for length and clarity.
Amy was a Girl Scout as a kid and is now a leader of her 7-year-old daughter’s troop. She solicited her daughter’s opinion:
She said: “I love it! I love that it is only girls. I hope Girl Scouts lasts forever and stays just girls.” The gist was that boys talk loudly all at once, over one another, but in a single-gender space she and her friends can listen to the adult, talk amongst themselves, and respond. At 7 she is aware of the differences in airtime that boys and girls get in class, and she values Girl Scouts as a space where she and her friends can have their voices heard.
About 10 years ago, L. joined the Freemasons, a fraternal organization. He likes that it is all male, because certain gender considerations are irrelevant:
At work, I’m always careful to ensure women are included at every level, and I sometimes hold myself back so that my male privilege doesn’t trample over women who are just as competent as I am but might be overlooked due to gender bias. At the lodge, as we do charity projects and so forth, I can assert myself as much as I want, and if I am elevated to a leadership position, it’s because I earned it through merit, not privilege.
Elena encouraged her ex to spend time around other men at an all-male philanthropic organization:
The club offered a respite from the demands of what it might mean to be a professional, family, or single man and gave them a safe space to connect, discuss, or brag. I felt it provided a fortification of male identity, built up confidence in his role, and gave him a purpose in society. I think men- or women-only clubs further the ideals of what it means to be a man or woman and allow members to find common ground and experiences unapologetically.
Susan is 70 and dislikes gender-separate spaces:
I grew up with severe limitations on life opportunities due to being female. We were “groomed” to be homemakers. Even work was segregated, as men wanted to maintain their separate norms and behaviors, many of which were rude and crude. I maintain that locker rooms perpetuate misconceptions as much as sewing circles as teens try to figure out why things are as they are, making up what they don’t understand.
Naomi, who values all-female spaces, replied from a nail salon in the suburbs:
One thing that makes pedicures a treat is the all-female space. Occasionally there’s a guy client in city salons. In the suburbs, that is an oddity. Here, with the music and mild pampering, there’s no expectation of women to Do or Be, just relaxed comfort. At 67, long past being ogled by men, and retired from being the ballsy woman communications VP, I value being invisible. Only my husband, close friends, and family really see me. It’s such a relief. All-female spaces are no longer necessary, but I’m so glad I had them.
Meridith, a female Baby Boomer, reflected on a life dividing time between “coed” and gendered spaces:
I learned to meet traditional expectations for little girls to behave demurely, charmingly, supportively, passively, and modestly coquettish in mixed company. I learned it was not okay to be opinionated, smart, or competitive in the presence of males. Sadly, same-sex places were equally restrictive and imparted only more direct lessons about gender-appropriate behavior. The strictures of fashion and comportment, and the social penalties for nonconformity, were most severe among adolescent females until the late 1960s. In the all-girl classes, clubs, and lessons, approval (popularity) was contingent on being “nice” (congenial, friendly) and respecting the social pecking order of the group.
Gender defined every generation until Gen X. It has been both challenging and wonderful to see those barriers become more permeable.
Sarah, 24, finds that separate gatherings solve a problem she is having:
I’m currently struggling with the fact that I feel I can’t be myself in a social space when my partner is around. I need to focus on making him happy and avoid topics that might lead to an argument between us that would be better held in private. But it feels exclusionary to want to go to a social gathering without him.
All-female gatherings are an excuse to hang out as myself. In a broader sense, women often spend effort ensuring men are happy, and it just feels drastically different when that pressure is not present. And I expect there might be analogous feelings for men; even though they’re not socialized as much to be gracious hosts, it might be freeing to interact without pressure to just be the version of themselves that their female loved ones encourage. Of course it feels concerning for women to hear “no girls allowed” because of the history of hearing this again and again, but I’d also suggest that if we want men to do their part to lift each other up and take on each other’s emotional labor, so that we don’t have to do this all the time, we need to give them the space to try it out.
Eden, who identifies as genderqueer, grants that there are benefits “to limiting a space to people of a particular gender,” but asks, “Where does that leave the rest of us?”
Although I was assigned male at birth and generally pass for male, I am not a man. I feel discomfort every time I have no choice but to use the men’s room. I recognize that gender expansiveness is a relatively new concept in Western culture. Progress, acceptance, and integration are slow. But the all-male and all-female spaces presented in the question do leave the rest of us hung out to dry. There may be no single-gender solution for the nonbinary among us … When a space is presented as “all-male” or “all-female,” how do we define exactly who falls into those categories, and how do we enforce those definitions?
Sarah graduated from an all-girls high school in 1976:
There was a certain spaciousness for students’ affect, style, and behavior because there were no boys to occupy a whole big chunk of the spectrum. People were loud, quiet, butch, femme, bossy, retiring, earnest, goofy ... and all of it was considered normal girl behavior because we were all girls by definition. We had no expectation of automatic deference to boys in terms of achievement, opinions, or forceful argument, because we developed our opinions and expectations for intellectual achievement with only girls around. This was meaningful when gender roles were changing, but expectations of girls deferring to boys in order to attract them were still prevalent. Careers as a natural part of our lives was still not fully in view, but they wanted us to be brilliant nonetheless!
When I got to a coed Ivy League school, this served me well. I was not intimidated about having opinions, expected to excel, and made many male friends, having never learned to bring dating and gender-linked behavior into my learning environment. I think every woman can benefit from a female learning space at some point, for that simple freedom of not always being defined “in opposition to” or as “complementary to” maleness.
Nick went to an all-male private college and found it enlightening:
It felt like a place that wanted us to think about what it means to be a man and what healthy masculinity looks like. My favorite moment came in Bible study, where we would close each session arm-in-arm saying the Lord’s Prayer and we would look each other in the eyes. It was weird at first, but came to symbolize the idea that masculinity is not solitary; it’s a collective, and needs us to look out for one another, to be “brother’s keepers” in the best sense. I think we need places where men can explore what it means to be a man in healthy ways … There is still a purpose for single-gender spaces––to grow, to wrestle, and to come out the other side better than when we entered.
Jaleelah was a Girl Guide for a decade, and grew up in a religion that favors gender segregation.
Some girls I knew professed to feeling safer without men and boys sleeping in their cabins. This feeling is rational—most sexual assaults are committed by men, and most happen between familiar parties. I felt the same way when I was a child (I threw a tantrum and refused to enter my classroom the first time I had a male substitute teacher), but I no longer believe that the benefits of sticking exclusively to women outweigh the costs. Some of my closest friends are men; some of the worst people I know are women. It doesn’t make sense to base my social decisions on sexual-assault statistics.
I feel uniquely suited to respond to the claim that all-women spaces are valuable because they allow for vulnerability and discussion of common interests. I have many masculine interests and not many feminine ones. It makes sense for things like makeup-discussion clubs or polycystic ovarian syndrome support groups to exist. But sex/gender-segregated groups aren't the most efficient way to help people connect to similar peers.
When gender segregation is the norm rather than a quirk of a weekly social group, women get the short end of the stick. Almost all the mosques I have attended confine women to tiny, plain rooms during services. (Literally the only counterexample I can think of is the Dome of the Rock.) Men get large, ornate halls. Separate-but-equal is a myth in all respects.