‘Gender neutral’ women’s club at Harvard won’t have to accept men: report

An historically all-female club at Harvard University can continue to restrict its admission to men but still be considered in compliance with new the school’s new “gender neutral” membership requirements.

In May the Ivy League institution approved new rules, going into effect this fall semester, which will penalize students who are officers of student organizations which discriminate on the basis of sex. As this paper reported at the time, new policy bars so-called final club members from captaincies, leadership positions and fellowships.

But with classes set to resume at the storied Cambridge, Mass. school, Harvard has interpreted its new rules in a way which protects at least one feminist group, The Seneca organization, which does not open its membership to men.

“Harvard’s Dean of Student Affairs reportedly assured the Seneca group that it could ’could continue to operate as it always has.’ All it has to do is make semantic changes to its bylaws,” Heat Street noted on Tuesday, relaying Monday’s original reporting in the Harvard Crimson.

“Like Women in Business or Latinas Unidas, although men may apply, our membership can be made up wholly of women without incurring the sanctions of the administration’s new policy,” Heat Street quoted Seneca’s leader from an email she sent members. 

While Harvard’s written policy seems to make no such exceptions, according to Heat Street, school administrators say Seneca’s 501(c)3 registration with the IRS and its nature as more than a “social” fraternity means it falls outside the gender-neutral stipulation.

“Harvard says it is still working on policy implementation and won’t have rules ready until the fall of 2017,” noted Heat Street.

The Seneca organization, established in 1999, is named after the historic 1848 Seneca Falls convention, which called for equal rights for women and for women suffrage. According to the National Park Service, 32 men were signatories of Seneca’s Declaration of Intentions.

At the time of its founding, the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, expressed its reservations about the newly-formed group.

“The ostensible goals of the club are good ones, but its nebulous membership policy is troubling,” complained the Crimson’s staff in a May 24, 1999 editorial. “Without the benefit of College endorsement (and no single-sex social organization will or should be recognized by the College), the Seneca looks too much like a final club. And what Harvard women — and, for that matter, all undergraduates —need is for social life at the College to become less and not more fractionalized.”