It’s a bit of a journey from Jewesses bathing in New York to the feverish political goings on at Irish selection conventions.
But it all illustrates the tricky business of accommodation, discrimination and social engineering in relation to the sexes.
A row erupted in New York during the summer over women-only hours at a Brooklyn public swimming pool. The hours have been provided for decades so that local women from the Hasidic Jewish community can swim without having to do so in front of men.
A complaint this summer led to the pool's right to do this being withdrawn by the city authorities. Then the authorities changed their mind and allowed the women-only hours after all. This was criticised by the New York Times as, among other things, a breach of principles of fairness and equal access.
But is it? Others, such as the Jewish magazine Tablet, pointed out that several US cities have women-only hours to enable Muslim women to swim in publicly funded pools. Needless to say, this has left some people frothing at the mouth about Sharia Law.
In Ireland we have women-only gyms or gyms with women-only sections for those who feel more comfortable exercising with other women or who feel uncomfortable exercising with men.
Strictly speaking everything you do for one group can be seen as discrimination against those who are not members of the group – in these cases, men.
But these examples have more to do, I think, with accommodating the needs of women than with discriminating against men. It becomes discrimination if the only gym in town is women-only or if men-only hours were not allowed while women-only hours went ahead.
But it’s fluid. It’s not cut and dried. As the saying goes, “You have a right to your feelings but your feelings don’t give you rights”.
I see nothing wrong with accommodating women-only hours but nonetheless we need to be alive to the dangers of an accommodation too far. How would we feel about an “able-bodied hour” at the swimming pool for a group who didn’t want to share space with people with disabilities? We would rightly refuse to allow it – accommodating is not the same as bullying.
Which brings me to Irish selection conventions. Before the last election an unsympathetic public looked on as political parties tied themselves in knots over the rule that 30 per cent of candidates had to be women. Failure to meet the quota would mean a big cut in funding. At least some of the women subsequently elected owe their seats to that rule.
In an article on spunout.ie last year, Aoife McGoey argued against this rule saying that “women, just like men, should be chosen on the basis of their individual qualities and abilities. Gender shouldn’t play a role at all.”
In a recent reply Seán Lynch supported quotas saying that “systematic oppression of female candidates has meant that they simply haven’t been given the chance to get into politics and public representation in the first place ...”
I am glad to see more women in the Dáil but I have doubts as to whether this quota is a justifiable piece of positive discrimination. That’s because women have long had the opportunity to force change by favouring women candidates in the polling booth and they have not, so far as I can see, done so. I wish they had – the political parties would have got the message pretty quickly – but they haven’t.
So the quota seems to me to have more to do with social engineering than accommodating women’s needs. That the question of accommodation versus discrimination is live and unsettled is good. It’s a huge step forward from the long, long era in which the place of women was settled and could never change.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to debate an issue which is capable of covering a wide range of experience from swimming pools in New York to political conventions in community halls in Ireland.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@yahoo.com) is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email