Women-only hours at Harvard gym

Harvard University last month instituted women-only hours at one of their campus gyms. The hours are designed to accommodate female Muslim students at the university who find it easier to work out among women. The students asked the university for the women-only hours so they could dress in ways more appropriate to exercise (i.e. clothing that is not allowed in mixed-gender situations because of modesty requirements).
Needless to say, the policy has been controversial. Men have been crying about equal access (note that this is not the only gym on campus and this one is actually not very centrally located and there are only 6 hours a week when this policy is in effect) but it seems there is a decent amount of anti-Muslim sentiment behind some of the criticisms--by both men and women.
So we have issues of gender and religion and even the role of an educational institution.
The latter seems the easiest to address. A spokesperson for Harvard said is its responsibility of the school to provide access to a healthy lifestyle for all its students. And I agree. It is not as if schools do not make accommodations for religion on a regular basis. For example, when I worked at Cornell University there was a significant amount of planning that went into developing and maintaining a kosher dining station in a new dining facility. I have heard about schools assigning rooms and roommates to accommodate the practices of some students. Students of all religions are not penalized (theoretically at least, I have heard stories about professors not honoring the rules) for missing classes on religious holidays.
But the tougher issues are the ones about gender and religion. And they are ones that are not going away any time soon. I see more and more stories about Muslim women competing in sports around the world. (I do wonder though about the dress claims being made by the Harvard women. Muslim women are competing internationally in front of mixed-gender crowds and sports apparel companies are meeting their dress requirements--a la Nike's hijab worn by a Muslim runner a few years ago.)
But it's no secret that I dislike women-only spaces in gyms. This is compounded by the fact that I am no fan of religion either--any of them. The easy answer would be an unsympathetic one (and very much based on a white Western woman point of view): you choose to practice a religion that is oppressive to women. You are participating in your own oppression and women-only hours in a gym only perpetuates that. But, of course, there are many ways to practice Islam; Muslim women are not without agency. Also no one has been able to convince me that Islam is any more oppressive than most of the other religions out there. Plus, we all participate in our own oppression. Patriarchy isn't reserved for organized religion.
Frankly I have more respect for Muslim women who advocate for women-only spaces so they can maintain their religious practices and gain the advantages of exercise than all these women flocking to Curves where they most certainly are participating in their own oppression by buying into all the rhetoric about beauty standards that is perpetuated at such establishments.
Our attention gets called to stories such as these because it seems like these practices are so outside the norm and/or that sport is somehow religion-free. We rarely question the ubiquitous practice of prayer before games. And that's because it's Christian-based prayer. There are not a whole lot of complaints about invoking the Christian god in national anthem before almost every intercollegiate and professional sporting event. Even BYU's policy of not playing games on Sundays gets very little resistance in the world of intercollegiate athletics. Maybe we should be taking a closer look what and whose practices we are picking on and why.

Monday musings

I had a great opportunity to talk about gender equity this weekend when I was on a longish bike ride. One of the women in the group is a former PE teacher and current freelance educator who works with schools to provide equitable after-school opportunities.
So while admiring the scenery and dodging angry drivers who did not appreciate our endeavors, we started talking about her past experiences with single-sex PE and sports activities. She noted that girls with whom she has worked really enjoyed, for example, learning sports skills in a single-sex environment and she would get comments from the participants like "It's so much better without boys around" and "I learned to do something I never thought I could do." And I supported this program and its outcomes. But it was only a one-time program.
When biker friend was a teacher, she taught single-sex PE. A few times she and the male PE teacher tried joint activities, but they quickly abandoned them because they didn't work (not sure of exactly why, however).
I didn't unleash any radical diatribe but I did comment that it seems difficult to know where and when the benefits of single-sex PE end or begin to outweigh the disadvantages and perpetuation of negative stereotypes. Because I don't doubt that girls feel very empowered by learning and even mastering skills in a no-boys environment. The problem is that we don't really know what they're going to do with all this empowerment. Is it really going to carry over into a classroom setting or a social setting where gender stereotypes are not so easily shattered no matter how empowered you have been in gym class.
Additionally, continuing to segregate PE classes (which is actually not allowed in many, if not most, public schools anymore--someone might want to correct me on this) sends a message to the boys as well. The assumption is that what the girls are doing on the other side of the wall is inferior to what they are doing because they bring to school stereotypes of girls' and women's physical inferiority. Sex segregation does not challenge these ideas.
So what happens when empowered girl meets socially constructed boy? I wish I could say that the positive feelings we get when we do something like throw a football or execute a perfect header into the goal or serve an ace carry over to the rest of our lives which include interactions with boys and men. But I am not sure I can believe this, at least not when looking at the way sport and physical activity is presented to girls. There isn't enough attention paid to the whole girl--it's just about making her more skilled and stronger physically. Again, these are good things but unless you connect them to the rest of her life they aren't going to have the full empowering effect.
But sport and feminism (yes, it's a feminist consciousness that I think is needed to counter these stereotypes to allow for a more effective empowerment) have a shaky relationship now and in the past. Unless we can infuse sport with some feminism and get more feminists to see the value and potential of sport things like single-sex PE become exercises in frustration.