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Harvard's Women-Only Gym Hours Begin Today

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

Last week, my undergraduate alma mater made the Fox News hitlist for announcing that it had decided to make a campus gym, the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center (QRAC) closed to men for a few hours a week. As the Harvard Crimson's former editorial chair Andrew Fine wrote, this story wouldn't have been news (or all that controversial) were it not for the source of and justification for the request: a group of female Muslim students requested women-only hours because they must otherwise be fully clothed when working out alongside men.

Much ado about something? The QRAC is not the centrally located gym on campus -- in fact, it is a 20-30 minute walk from the main classroom area and the bulk of the university's undergraduate population (a far closer gym, the Malkin Athletic Center, has its own problems). The hours selected for the gender limitation are "off" hours, during which very few students would likely trek from their classrooms to the QRAC. Still, the confluence of religious and gender concerns has made the story on subject to much commentary in the press and blogsophere, including some good discussion of the legal issues involved:

My colleague Howard Friedman's Religion Clause

Volokh Conspiracy, "Women Only Exercise"

Title IX Blog

Harvard Crimson, "No Boys Allowed: Women-only hours at the QRAC constitute a pareto inefficient policy"

Harvard Crimson, "The All New Girls' Club QRAC Turns Single Sex"

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).