Some staff members hired to work the front desk or run events saw their job duties inflated to include scrubbing toilets, washing dishes and lint-rolling couches. Members who joined for a refuge from public bathrooms were now also claiming refuge from the patriarchy. The Wing convened meetings where members and employees could discuss racial tensions. But when Gelman posted her mea culpa on Instagram, glowing reviews flooded into the comments: “So important.” “I didn’t know I could love and admire you even more.” “Bravo.” Whatever improvements might be in store for its employees in the future, the Wing had already successfully fixed the flaw in its public reputation.
But soon they became disillusioned. “I’ve been made to feel small, insignificant, stupid,” one employee says.
At one community event, planned at the suggestion of a friend of Gelman’s, black employees served a crew of redheads as they discussed the societal woes of gingers. After the New York City Commission on Human Rights began an investigation into the Wing’s gender policy and a Washington man sued over being denied access to the club, the company instituted a policy of allowing men through its doors. She realized, she told The New York Observer in 2016, that carving out space for women was a “subtly radical” idea. It is pitched as a social experiment: what the world would look like if it were designed by and for women, or at least millennial women with meaningful employment and a cultivated Instagram aesthetic. Yes, it may co-opt a political movement for profit, but it is moving the levers of capitalism for the benefit of women, tailoring products for female consumers and transferring cash into the coffers of women leaders. Gelman reiterated an article published on Feb. 26 in Fast Company, in which she wrote that she had tried to play the role of the perfect “girlboss,” promoting the “fantasy” that a female founder could “have it all.” But behind the scenes, she wrote, her “fear of failure” had led her to obscure the “real challenges” unfolding at the Wing. Join the waitlist to be first to access digital Wing membership. “It is a bribe, but like all bribes it offers concrete benefits.” She added, “For women, buying and wearing clothes and beauty aids is not so much consumption as work.”. Audrey Gelman, then a 28-year-old public-relations savant and New York personality, was tired of dashing between meetings in New York and Washington, charging her phone in hotel lobbies and freshening up in the public restrooms of fast-casual chains. The news of the day might be dispiriting for women, Gelman told Entrepreneur magazine, “but to see women coming together and fighting back and organizing — whether through the Women’s March or in support of organizations like the Wing — that’s the silver lining to all of this.”, Like the women’s clubs, consciousness-raising groups, feminist bookstores and lesbian separatist womyn’s lands that came before it, the Wing’s organizing structure gestures at radical potential. They enlisted the historian Alexis Coe to research early American women’s clubs and traced a line between those efforts and their own. In this mode, consumer luxuries take on a feminist valence too, signifying power and the mechanism for accruing more. “I was the connector, the friend, the therapist, the mother, the sister, the live-in coach,” one former employee says. If in the 1960s a segment of the feminist movement was concerned with advancing women in the work force, that impulse has now been so thoroughly individualized that a woman’s career can be cast as a kind of feminist statement in and of itself. “People were emotionally vulnerable at the community gatherings on race,” an employee says. In February 2018, the Wing opened its first Brooklyn location, an expansive space in Dumbo with a sunken velvet conversation pit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face etched into pink wallpaper and a golden welcome note embedded in the floor that read: “YOU HAVE ARRIVED.” On many days, perched behind the curved wooden front desk was Vei Darling. “It was only so that they could exploit my presence and my image for their own purposes,” they say, “to make it seem like they were more inclusive than they actually were.” In June 2019, when Dumbo employees were paid several days late, Darling wrote an email copied to Gelman and Kassan describing what Darling and their colleagues felt was “a toxic culture” of “passive aggression,” “disrespect” and “fear of retribution.” Wing employees “don’t get paid enough for our immense physical, intellectual and emotional labor,” Darling wrote. RSVP for access to digital events open to the public from The Wing and join our digital membership waitlist. “This is a place for ‘women on their way,’ unless you work at the Wing.” Maya Sari Ahmed, who worked as a design director in Wing headquarters, says she was chastised by a manager after sharing with her team that she’d had a psychotic episode. (The member said she herself did not understand the language.) “It’s just like any other company that wants to make their money.”, Luxury and feminism have long been intertwined.
She says she was told that she was creating an unstable work environment, even as she worked to produce Wing stickers that read “WOMEN SUPPORTING WOMEN SUPPORTING WOMEN.” (The Wing spokeswoman said the company provides mental health benefits to all its employees.
As the company rapidly expanded and new members flooded into crowded spaces, a chasm opened between members and the staff. Through all of this, some of these very same Wing employees could be seen on Instagram, grinning from the Perch or gladly pouring lattes in Wing-logo shirts. “It was Gaslighting 101,” one employee says. A version of the Perch menu reassured them that “the Wing provides equitable, living wages to all of our employees, front- and back-of-house alike.” (The Wing spokeswoman said that the company has always “maintained employment best practices.”).
(Many — citing fear of losing their jobs, of being sued over breaking the nondisparagement clause in their employment contract or of retribution from the Wing’s powerful professional network — agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity. (Multiple employees of The New York Times, including of this magazine, are Wing members.) And they are women, too. The Wing is a network of co-working and community spaces designed for women, with physical locations across the US and London, as well as a growing, worldwide digital community.
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