The rise of private all-ladies clubs Working women
All-ladies clubs champion female talent, but will gender-specific spaces help improve equality, asks Eleanor Steafel
Tucked behind Tottenham Court Road, on the other side of an otherwise nondescript black door, lies an oasis for working women. It’s 9am, and the Allbright club in Rathbone Place is already in full swing. In the light-flooded restaurant, breakfast meetings are playing out over homemade granola and oat milk flat whites. In the basement studio, a pre-work yoga class has just finished, while the salon bustles with women getting ready for the day ahead. On the exquisitely decorated floors above, pitching and interview practice sessions are beginning, with women of all ages sitting on plush velvet chairs, notebooks resting on their laps, primed to share their ideas.
A slogan plastered across the windows of the UK’S first women-only private members’ club quotes Virginia Woolf: “A woman must have money and a room of her own.” The Bloomsbury set would have been clamouring to become members at this five-storey Georgian town house, where advertising executives take meetings alongside actresses, and empires are built over cocktails.
In just 18 months, founders Debbie Wosskow and Anna Jones have launched their first site in Fitzrovia, (membership is £750 a year), and begun work on a second in Mayfair, set to open in 2019. Everything from the art on the walls to the products in the bathrooms is designed by women, with women in mind – all part of the club’s mission to champion female talent and female-led businesses.
Allbright isn’t unique in its aim to turn tweedy men’s clubs on their heads. In London alone, there’s We Heart Mondays, a co-working and community space in Hackney Wick; Sorority, which counts presenter Katie Derham and film-maker Gurinder Chadha among its members; and Grace Belgravia, a £5,500-a-year health club offering everything from gallery launches to gynaecologist appointments under its Knightsbridge roof.
Just this week it was announced that Women Fest, the first all-female festival, will take place in Frome in Somerset next month, while womenonly sports groups, not to mention societies, clubhouses, retreats and trips, are cropping up across Britain.
They’re big business in the United States, too. The Wing, founded in 2016 by Audrey Gelman – a former press aide for Hillary Clinton and longtime friend of Lena Dunham – and businesswoman Lauren Kassan, cites its mission as “the professional, civic, social and economic advancement of women”, and counts an impressive list of celebrities among its 1,500 members in New York and Washington DC.
And yet, the company is the subject of an investigation for breaking strict anti-discrimination laws, begging the question, in the age of #Metoo and Time’s Up, whether gender-specific spaces are only going to drive men and women even further apart?
Tiana Jacout, founder of Woman Fest, is adamant that the festival is by no means designed to be an “anti-men symposium”; rather a chance for women to come together to support and learn from one another. “As long as you identify as a woman, then this festival is for you,” reads the flyer for the £225 event, which will include basket-weaving, campfire debates and a “sacred womb” tent, billed as a space to contemplate modern feminism.
“When we as women go about our daily lives, we’ve got our protections up at all times,” explains Jacout, “because history has shown us that you have to have your protections up most of the time. [This is] about creating a space where we can drop those and see what’s underneath when we don’t constantly have to be on high alert.”
However, they may have to deal with infiltrators – Spectator columnist Rod Liddle has announced plans to attend by “self-identifying” for the day.
Off the coast of Finland, meanwhile, the isolated Supershe Island hosts the world’s first all-female wellness and networking retreat – which doesn’t just exclude men, but also any woman who can’t pass a heavily vetted video interview and cover the £3,500 fee.
Founder Kristin Roth rejects any criticism of gender discrimination, though: “You can focus on ‘no men’ or you can focus on ‘for women’ and it’s really your choice,” she says. “I say, ‘for women’.”
Why does Allbright feel it’s necessary to restrict membership to women, especially as they will inevitably want to deal with men in their everyday working lives? “The data speaks for itself,” says Wosskow. “We are miles off in terms of equality [in business], so our initial focus was on funding female entrepreneurs, because that is such an urgent thing.”
Allbright, which counts actresses Naomie Harris and Ruth Wilson, entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox and Sarah Brown among its founding members, is designed as a space for women to redress the imbalance in British entrepreneurship, which sees just nine per cent of the annual funding into UK start-ups go to female-founded businesses.
According to the Entrepreneurs Network, men are 86 per cent more likely than women to be venture capital-funded.
Allbright also provides free online courses to women across the country hoping to start a business, with advice from businesswomen including Cath Kidston, Karen Blackett (chairwoman of Mediacom) and former Masterchef winner Thomasina Miers.
“What became very obvious to us was the magic that happens when you get a load of amazing women from different backgrounds in a room,” says Wosskow. “We think, in order to build these connections and this community, we need the building to be an unashamedly feminine space, a space designed to support ambitious women.”
Their members use the club as a place to relax as much as to network and – unlike most women’s clubs – men are very much allowed through the doors. And in the evening, “the candles come out, the lights go down, the music is turned up and the cocktails start flowing”.
“On any given day, there are lots of men here,” says Wosskow. “However, this is a space that is celebratory of women and tailored to women.”
Though they have no plans to ape the Wing’s strict “no men” policy, they find something “very delicious” about watching their members sign men into their club. “It is empowering,” says Wosskow. “And there is a lot of joy in that.”