Harvard wants to ban gender discrimination. Here’s why that’s smart.

Harvard will start sanctioning members of single-gender, off-campus social clubs. This is a huge move, and it will, in due time, force all such clubs to go co-ed. (If the ban on leadership positions and scholarship eligibility doesn’t prove an effective nudge, Faust’s letter to Dean Khurana suggests that they’ll ratchet up these sanctions until they find something effective.)

These actions are widely seen as specifically targeting the all-male final clubs. These clubs have, historically, been particulalry influential, and they’ve helped make the social scene on Harvard’s campus what it is today. (See Dylan Matthews’ entertaining piece if you want to better appreciate their negative influence.) While the clubs have long been criticized by both Harvard undergrads and the administration, recent criticism has focused more on their role in abetting sexual assault.

Yet the newly-announced sanctions affect all single-gender organizations, not just the all-male final clubs. And their public announcement focused instead on discriminatory membership requirements. In her letter, Faust writes:

Although the fraternities, sororities, and final clubs are not formally recognized by the College, they play an unmistakable and growing role in student life, in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values. The College cannot…endorse selection criteria that reject much of the student body merely because of gender. …They encourage a form of self-segregation that undermines the promise offered by Harvard’s diverse student body. And they do not serve our students well when they step outside our gates into a society where gender-based discrimination is understood as unwise, unenlightened, and untenable.

I join you in urging the unrecognized social organizations to discard their gender-based membership practices, to adopt an open application process, and to establish greater overall transparency.

The Question We Should Be Asking

So, of course, Harvard students, Harvard alumni, and Harvard-adjacent people have freaked out about all of this. These moves have been called violations of the freedom of association. (They aren’t.) Some say such moves set a dangerous precedent and could lead to other discriminatory rules, like the banning of religious clubs. (It won’t.) Somewhat more convincingly, many have criticized these sanctions as indiscriminate, unfairly targeting all single-gender social organizations, even the ‘blameless’ all-female final clubs and sororities.

It’s worth separating out a few different issues here:

• Should universities ever exercise authority over independent, off-campus student organizations?
• Should universities ever place any restrictions on how student organizations are run?
• If we accept that universities can place restrictions on student organizations, which restrictions are wise?

I want to focus just on this last issue. In particular, is it wise to require that clubs not consider gender when accepting new members? (The other two questions are, I think, much easier to answer, but have distracted conversation away from this harder, more interesting question.)

I think Harvard’s new policy can be defended even if it’s not, in principle, always a wise policy. (Contingent facts about Harvard’s history make it especially important to force the all-male final clubs to go co-ed, and this might be the best way to achieve that goal.) But I want leave that aside and address the general principle: is it a good thing to force a move away from instutionally-gendered social spaces towards more integrated, mixed-gender social spaces?

If anti-gender-discrimination policy is put in place and enforced, the transition to a new status quo will no doubt be painful and costly, especially for current students. But, again, we can set that aside for now and try to figure out whether the goal of non-gendered social organizations is worth pursuing.

Before this move, Harvard’s non-discrimination policy for recognized student groups didn’t garner much controversy or attention. Is there something special about social clubs?

(Note that Harvard already requires all recognized student organizations to have merit-based membership policies that don’t take things like gender or religion into account. In practice, such non-discrimination policies don’t ‘ban’ organizations like Women in Business or Hillel. But such organizations have to be open to anyone who wants to join, including non-women and non-Jews. The new sanctions are merely an instrument by which Harvard hopes to extend previously uncontroversial policies to currently unrecognized student groups.)

Why Gender Discrimination Is a Bad Idea

Try to earnestly consider: What’s the point of single-gender social organizations anyway? What are the benefits (and costs) of making gender serve as a qualification for entry into such clubs?

As anyone who’s ever been in such a group will tell you, things are just different when the other gender isn’t around. And this different mode of socializing can be attractive. It allows for a kind of ‘bonding’ that might not occur in mixed-gender groups. For women in particular, all-female groups can provide a much-needed welcoming and supportive community when the wider community is so often subtly (or no so subtly) hostile towards women.

But it’s not obvious that these benefits come without significant costs.

Here, I can speak from experience. I was a member of an all-male a Capella group, the Harvard Krokodiloes. This group gave me so many amazing experiences: I got to travel the world, perform with some incredibly talented people, form close relationships, and learn to be a little less selfish and weird.

But lots of things about my experience weren’t so great, and the all-male aspect of the group was definitely not-so-great. Casual misogyny was pretty common. The bro-y culture lent itself to certain kinds of relationships/socializing and not others. I found myself indulging in this culture in ways that, in retrospect, I’m pretty uncomfortable with. This both made it a little easier for me to enter ‘bro’ mode and left other aspects of my personality unnurtured.

And we simply had more awesome opportunities because of the institutional legacy of our all-male group. Our sister group, the all-female Pitches, didn’t have the same legacy and the prestige that went along with it. As a result, they had fewer connections and fewer opportunities. Kinda sucks, doesn’t it?

(By the way, The Krokodiloes, as an officially recognized student organization, do not explicitly take gender into account when auditioning members. They will audition a tenor, baritone, or bass of any gender.)

For both men and women, single-gender groups can reinforce and help perpetuate gendered stereotypes. The ‘sensitive’ male can be made to ‘toughen’ up. A young woman can feel alienated from a group that, for instance, talks about how each other looks in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable.

But these are just small examples. And I think careful reflection should reveal that the supposed benefits of single-gender groups aren’t all that beneficial. Single gender socializing can be superficially satisfying, in the same way that some single-race socializing can be superficially satisfying. Maybe you’re more ‘comfortable’ in such a setting, but is that really a good thing? We’d (hopefully?) never allow this to justify race-based membership policies. And prohibiting groups that explicitly exclude particular genders or races doesn’t mean minority groups won’t be able to come together and discuss their difficulties in a supportive space–it just means that our institutions shouldn’t help fossilize and support the differences between races/genders.

We don’t support a ‘separate but equal’ policy when it comes to race. So why think it’s appropriate when it comes to gender?

Why Appeals To ‘Innate’ Differences Aren’t Relevant

Here, I expect many will object that the analogy to race is not appropriate. The differences between men and women are not like the differences between races. Men and women, due to biology, tend to have different personalities/values/interests and tend to enjoy different kinds of activities. So maybe there’s something beneficial in coming to appreciate one’s identity as a male or female through single-gender organizations.

I don’t think this analysis is right–the personality differences between the genders are easily over-emphasized, can potentially be (partially) explained by cultural expectations, and are relatively minor compared to all that we have in common. But even if it were true that the genders were different in fundamental and unchangeable ways, this still wouldn’t justify gender segregation.

We find race-based discrimination gross not because the races are identical (either in principle or in fact). Rather, it’s gross because we think that race is not the right variable to be tracking. We can accept that blacks and whites tend to be different in certain ways without thereby finding it acceptable to use race as measure for the things we actually care about.

Go ahead and form communities around particular values, but don’t use gender as a lazy elligibility metric for community membership. Just as it would be unwise to limit “Tall People Club” membership to only men (who tend to be taller), it would be similarly unwise to limit membership to, say, a fashion club to only women (who tend to be more interested in fashion). And while it’s, perhaps, understandable that the interests/abilities that a fashion club wants to track won’t be evenly distributed between the genders, it’s much harder to argue that men and women have meaningfully different interests/abilities in socializing.

A Worthwhile Goal

So those who oppose Harvard’s attempt to discourage single-gender social organizations need to explain why the single-gender aspect of these clubs are a good thing. Without a rationale, it’s just arbitrary discrimination.

And the rationale for mixed-gender organizations seems pretty reasonable: If there aren’t fundamental differences, then there’s nothing gained by limiting membership to a single gender. If there are fundamental differences (either innate or cultural), then it should be valuable to have diverse perspectives on the activity that brings you all together.

A non-discrimination policy won’t ‘make’ the genders equal at Harvard, just as similar policies don’t ‘make’ blacks and whites have ‘equal’ experiences. But such inequalities shouldn’t be institutionalized. And non-discrimination policies help speed up progress.