When Men Can’t Join the Club : YWCA Chapter Hired the Best Person for the Job; Trouble Was, He’s a Man

TACOMA, Wash. — On the third floor of the Tacoma YWCA, there are 70 arguments in favor of the theory that inequities between the sexes remain late into the 1980s.

Each argument takes the form of a bed reserved for a woman driven from her home by a violent spouse or boyfriend.

There’s the case. Clear enough.

There is a trickier debate, however, swirling around the ground floor of the historic, five-story brick Y building. There, the appointment of 34-year-old bespectacled Alan Tiger as the first male executive director in the history of the Young Women’s Christian Assn. is raising questions of just how a women’s group best goes about righting social inequities.

Does it remain a “single-sex” group, as it has for 130 years, providing an environment where women can operate “without the influence of a socialization process that tends to teach women to defer to men,” as national executive director Gwendolyn Calvert Baker has said it should?

Or does it integrate the sexes, as recent court rulings have forced some men’s clubs to do?

Unlike the YMCA, a group that reports that men and women participate equally in all its organizational capacities, the YWCA “as a whole has reaffirmed that it wants to be a single-sex organization,” said Jane Pinkerton, spokeswoman for the national group in New York. Her reply referred to a meeting last month at which 1,200 delegates of the 2-million-member YWCA voted to uphold the group’s all-female tradition.

May Disaffiliate

In fact, the national group has threatened to disaffiliate its Tacoma Chapter, to forbid it from enjoying benefits such as use of the YWCA name, because the chapter violated a rule requiring the executive director to be a voting YWCA member, meaning the director must be a woman. Lesser positions in the YWCA can and have been filled by men but leaders say the group remains an overwhelmingly female organization.

Last month, the YWCA of Tacoma and Pierce County responded by suing the national headquarters in Pierce County Superior Court. The suit asks the court to prevent the national YWCA from enforcing its no-men stance because to do so would violate Washington state anti-discrimination laws and the Washington Equal Rights Amendment, said Shawn Ann Flood, the local chapter’s attorney.

She said the Tacoma case is not on point with recent legal battles over all-male clubs because “it’s really an employment issue, not a membership issue.”

In principle, some see the appointment of a male executive director as a second slap at the YWCA’s decision to be a women’s group. That policy initially was challenged in February when the Ogden, Utah, chapter was disaffiliated for allowing men as members.

The dispute is happening at a delicate time for the YWCA, following as it does the controversies over men’s clubs. They have provoked such strong reaction that some cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, have passed local ordinances that forbid large, exclusive private clubs from barring women and minorities. The U.S. Supreme Court on June 20 upheld the legality of such local laws. But now, the YWCA’s conduct in the Tacoma case looks to some people as if women are saying: We want to join your clubs but you can’t join ours.

“In the feminist community, many women have been working for years to get women hired and to fight discrimination in employment,” said Judie Fortier, a former YWCA staff member from Tacoma. Many of those activists now find themselves in an awkward position when they try to formulate their stance on the YWCA and the Tiger case, which “puts these same women in a very hard position to come out and say, ‘You shouldn’t have hired a man.’ ”

Facilities Open to Men

But Miriam Graves, a former Tacoma YWCA board member, said the organization is different from the controversial men’s clubs because the YWCA is not simply a place for members to go and socialize or discuss business.

Besides providing facilities such as swimming pools, weight rooms and gyms--all of which are open to men--many YWCAs also run domestic violence shelters, counseling and education centers for displaced homemakers, rape-crisis hot lines and other women’s services. And, as an aged plaque on Tiger’s office wall describes it, the goal of the YWCA was, and is, to see to it “that life be more complete for women everywhere.”

Women can best accomplish that aim in an all-female environment, Graves said, likening the YWCA to an all-female high school. There, unlike in a co-educational institution where males likely would fill the roles, women can serve as class president and yearbook editor; they can use the experience to learn to compete in the larger world.

The YWCA, national spokeswoman Pinkerton said, “provides an environment and a climate in which women can gain the equality they seek.” The group’s inclusion of men would “dissipate if not eliminate” that atmosphere, she said.

Graves agreed, arguing that opening its ranks to men would make the YWCA “more like everyplace else” where men are in power.

Those who support retaining the YWCA’s all-female status cite on their behalf a 1987 Supreme Court ruling that let employers favor women and minorities over other qualified job applicants to compensate for a history of discrimination.

But others believe that excluding men is no way to compensate for years of discrimination. Just as women in a domestic-violence shelter must leave their protected environment and return to a world inhabited by men, those in the YWCA group had better get used to tussling with ambitious males, they say.

“The empowerment of women is what this is all about,” said Hope Witkowsky, the Torrance YWCA executive director. “Are we really empowered if we don’t learn how to work with men?”

As for Tiger, he said he feels he has been under pressure from the media to fan the controversy over his appointment. But he is dispassionate about the matter.

His employment, he said, is not a men’s rights or reverse discrimination issue: “I needed a job and they needed me. I’m absolutely not a rabble-rouser or a person looking for publicity.”

Tiger, who holds degrees in public administration and organizational communication and founded and directed a program in Denver for people with developmental disabilities, said his mother-in-law told him about the Tacoma job when he was living in Eugene, Ore.

He didn’t think he had a chance to get the position, in which he supervises a staff of 25 and a budget of $600,000 to $700,000, because “I thought they were a women’s organization and they weren’t under equal opportunity requirements.”

When he met with the board that hired him, they asked him many questions about his management style and organizational skills and little about women’s issues, he said.

Pene Modahl, president of the all-female board of the Tacoma YWCA, said Tiger’s ability to develop programs for the 400-member Y was more important to them than any other consideration, whether it be gender or experience with women’s concerns.

They knew when they hired Tiger that they were breaking a national YWCA rule, she said: “We realized they would be upset, of course. But we have to get out of this idea that men have some sort of unusual power over us. We’re not afraid that any man is going to come in and take over. Nobody, no matter who they are, is going to take control if you don’t let them.”

When Tiger moved into the director’s office, some staff members dropped by to tell him they were philosophically opposed to his presence in the organization, he said, adding, “Over time, I hope I’m accepted by a lot of people I’m not accepted by now.”

But Tiger feels the response to his hiring has been largely positive.

“Nobody wants to work for an organization that doesn’t want them,” he said, noting that at the going-away luncheon for the interim executive director he felt he won points with dubious staff members by showing up with a casserole dish filled with sweet-and-sour meatballs. His staff knew he had to have cooked them himself because his wife and two children were still in Eugene.

“Things like that will make me part of the culture here,” he said. “People will be saying: ‘The executive director can cook.’ ”

Tiger doesn’t pretend to be “the quintessential YWCA leader” and says, “Thousands of women could do this job; if they’d have applied, they’d have gotten the job.”

He said he believes the Tacoma YWCA will not be punished by the national group; unlike the disaffiliated YWCA in Utah, it will not have to plan a name change.

The national YWCA group is not saying what its next move will be in the matter. The board does not meet again until October, when “Tacoma may or may not be discussed,” Pinkerton said.

Tiger, meantime, said he feels little has changed at the Tacoma YWCA: “This is still a woman’s organization. Just because I’m the director doesn’t make this less of a women’s organization.”