The rule a club adopts states who it counts as a peer, and the institution teaches it

The argument

A second argument is about meaning rather than access. A club's rules are a formal statement, written down and enforced, about who may belong. To write into them that no woman may be a member is to state in the most official way available that women are not among those in whose company one's peers are found. Opponents argue that this is a claim about standing, not a preference about leisure, because of what the club is for and who its members are in the rest of their lives. The statement is also taught. Institutions pass expectations to those who come through them, and a young member learns, without anything needing to be said, that the senior figures of their profession gather somewhere their female colleagues cannot follow. Opponents argue that this shapes assumptions about who is a natural candidate for seniority long before anyone makes a decision about a particular person, and that it does so in those who would reject the proposition if it were put to them directly. The harm, on this account, therefore does not depend on showing that any individual woman was kept from anything. It lies in a standing arrangement among people of influence that formally ranks who belongs with whom, and in what that arrangement conveys to everyone who passes through it. Rules of this kind, opponents conclude, are not neutral containers for private preference; they are instruction in who counts, which is why they hold that such clubs should not survive.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents respond that this reads a sweeping claim out of a narrow arrangement. A club confined to men states that its members wish to spend some of their leisure among men, which is what a women-only group states in reverse and is not usually taken to express a judgement about the worth of men. They add that treating a voluntary association's rules as public instruction would license objection to any group's membership criteria, since every criterion says something about who belongs.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A membership rule states whom the club admits, which is not the same as whom its members count as equals. Members of such clubs work alongside women as colleagues daily and plainly do count them as peers. [Rejecting P2] Institutions transmit a great deal, but the premise needs this particular lesson to be the one received, and gives no reason to think members understand the rule as a ranking rather than as a preference about leisure. [Rejecting P3] A harm detached from anyone losing anything cannot be identified independently of the objection to it, which leaves the premise unfalsifiable. [Rejecting C] Treating a voluntary association's rules as public instruction licenses objection to every group's membership criteria, including those this argument's proponents support.