For centuries, women have been carving out rooms and communities of our own, whether they be centers, book clubs, religious groups, YWCAs, or, more recently, co-working spaces and businesses built specifically for women. But litigious men's rights activists (MRAs) have organized to challenge the legality of these groups, exploiting progressive civil rights legislation designed to protect the rights of the marginalized.
The fact that MRAs can't be in the spaces women-run companies have created frustrated a small, loud group of them, and in several key cases, the law has been on their side.
On January 20, 2018, the day of the second Women's March, Claire Wasserman got served with a lawsuit. Wasserman, the founder of Ladies Get Paid, a small business that helps women navigate their careers and advocate for themselves, was surprised by the timing, but not the case itself.
"After Trump, we're all realizing that our rights could be taken away in a second," she said at the time.
She'd expected it since four months earlier, when a man named Rich Allison tried to attend a Ladies Get Paid event in San Diego. Ladies Get Paid (LGP) did not allow Allison into the private event; he wasn't given an LGP drink discount, and they asked him to stay in the main bar.
They were later tipped off that professional plaintiffs were afoot. When they looked him up, they found he was an active member of the National Coalition for Men (NCFM), the country's oldest men's rights group, and part of a documented pattern of lawsuits against women's organizations throughout the 2010s.
The lawsuit against LGP was served in California, home to the Unruh Act, a comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation that ensures people across citizenship, race, religion, sex, and other categories "are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever." It quickly became apparent that the law, in purpose if not intent, was on Allison's side.
"[The NCFM] kept using language like 'Imagine if we were homosexuals and we were not allowed in!'" Wasserman told Girlboss at the time. "I was personally really, really offended by that. I'm gay and Jewish, and I'm a woman. On so many levels, I'm a person who is supposed to be protected."
The broader conversation she wished people would have had was not about equality, but about equity. "If you say, 'Treat everybody equally,' then that means we broke the law. But the point of this is to be equitable. We are striving to make men and women equal in the workplace, but because women are starting behind men, we believe we should be giving them additional benefits," she said.
Wasserman vocalized her frustration but couldn't afford to fight in court. She changed the organization's rules immediately, and they settled a month later. She declined to talk about the terms of the settlement.
While much was made of the NYC Human Rights Commission's investigation of female and nonbinary co-working space The Wing, The Wing was never sued over it, and no findings from the investigation were ever publicly released. The company shut down permanently in 2022 after years of internal turmoil unrelated to that case. But LGP was far from alone as a target.
Alfred Rava, an attorney based in San Diego, has represented NCFM and individual plaintiffs in numerous cases against women's pricing and events. He reportedly won a $125,000 settlement from San Diego nightclubs that held "Ladies' Nights," where women received discounts; $12,000 from a San Diego theater that sold half-priced tickets for women; and, according to the American Bar Association Journal, a settlement from the Oakland A's over a Mother's Day promotion that gave free sun hats to women attendees.
There were other settlements; that's just a sample. One of Rava's cases went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor. Most defendants chose to settle rather than incur the cost of taking the case to trial, while others lost to him outright. A notable exception was Trump's golf course, which was sued in 2016 after offering a breast cancer awareness month discount and had the resources to beat NCFM in court.
This isn't just history. A related class action against a San Diego nightclub, originally filed in 2020 over the same kind of "ladies' night" pricing that operated until the club closed in 2020, reached a tentative $7 million settlement in 2025. Rava represented plaintiffs in a related opt-out suit filed that same year. The campaign against women-only pricing and events didn't end in 2018. It's still active.
While Wasserman's supportive community crowdfunded her substantial legal fees, she said the process took a significant emotional toll. "I'm going to continue, as this obviously demonstrates how badly I need to continue this work, but this isn't fun anymore," she said. "And I'm not gonna get that back."
As anyone who has found solace in female and nonbinary spaces knows, the argument for these spaces is clear. Women do not always feel that we can speak frankly about our experiences and our unique challenges in the company of unknown men. Those who sexually harass, underpay, or underestimate us in the workplace are often men.
The NCFM has been bringing these kinds of cases for more than a decade, and it did so in a political climate shaped in part by the first Trump administration. In March 2017, that administration tucked a line into a signing statement that implicitly questioned the foundational premise of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) receiving race-based federal funding, a move that drew criticism from HBCU advocates and lawmakers at the time.
So what do we do to protect spaces where marginalized communities can find some solidarity and solace? As with so many things, the problem is far easier to identify than the solution.
Megan Cesare-Eastman, an attorney who represented Ladies Get Paid, noted that California Government Code 11135, which prohibits discrimination in programs or activities funded by the state, is followed by a section clarifying: "This article shall not be interpreted in a manner that would frustrate its purpose" and "This article shall not be interpreted in a manner that would undermine lawful programs which benefit members of the protected bases described in Section 11135."
Were there sufficient political will, the legislature could add a similar clarification to the Unruh Act, which applies to businesses. But, Cesare-Eastman noted, "we would, of course, want to carefully consider the wording and long-term effect of any such change." No such clarifying amendment to the Unruh Act has been made, and given how active this litigation still is, that gap in the law remains very much live.
The key issue is that women and those who support them have less money to fight with than the men and corporations who would see us lose. That's the very same issue that Ladies Get Paid, now focused primarily on one-on-one coaching and research into what it calls the "self-trust gap," was created to solve. Go figure.
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