Shutterstock
Men and women are and always should be equal. There’s no reason for anything but equality in today’s world. For that reason, colleges and universities across the country have fraternities for men and sororities for females. As these are social organizations, they are not in violation of Title IX, which stats, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Makes sense, right? But this distinction isn’t good enough for a group of students at Yale University who are demanding that women be allowed to join fraternities.
Engender, a Yale student group, is trying to convince the administration that women should be let into all-male fraternities because…reasons? They are using Title IX as the foundation of their argument and claiming that fraternities are discriminating against women.
Courtesy of the Yale Daily News:
“According to co-directors of Engender, the fraternity Sigma Nu declined the request for female and nonbinary students to attend rush events by citing the right to free association for an all-male institution. Chi Psi made an explicit note that, as per the bylaws of their national organization, females are not allowed at their rush events, Engender co-directors said. …
McGrew said that for many of the fraternities they contacted, their national bylaws were likely not specific in how they define gender requirements for recruitment versus membership. For example, SigEp’s national organization notified its Yale chapter that coed rush events would be fine as long as no females received bids, he said.
Co-directors of Engender, including McGrew, anticipated that following its recent campaign, many fraternity national organizations will define their bylaws to include more explicit gender requirements for the rush process. But from the perspective of some national organizations, only people eligible to join the fraternities are actually considered to be actively rushing.
With the conclusion of Greek life recruitment, Engender — a student group that coordinated the attendance of female students at the fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon’s rush events — plans to take its course to the next stage and lobby the Yale administration to intervene in the single gender membership policies of fraternities by helping local Yale chapters navigate the gender requirement bylaws of their national organizations as well as prepare the wider student community for a social system in which more gender inclusive spaces exist on campus.”
As of now, Engender is not demanding that sororities allow males into sororities, which kind of contradicts their central argument.
Hey, if women want to drink copious amounts of alcohol, be forced to perform menial and sometimes embarrassing tasks, and learn a bunch of ancient rituals, that’s all well and good. The thing is, they can do all of that in a sorority.
