Ladies Get Paid is a female-owned and operated organization with the mission of offering women and non-binary people the education, tools, and resources to close the wage gap and move forward (and upward) in their careers. Of course, any time women do anything that’s “women only” to offset lifetimes of systemic discrimination, there are certain men who cry things like “reverse discrimination!” Ladies Get Paid has been sued by a “men’s rights” organization, and they could use your help.
Claire Wasserman started Ladies Get Paid about a year and a half ago, frustrated with the continuing gender wage gap, as well as the fact that it affects women of color disproportionately. LGP holds events and provides resources for women to push for higher pay and more career opportunities. In the video above, Wasserman describes how their events function, as well as the reasoning behind why their events are for women and non-binary people only, which would make sense to most people with a brain.
In August of 2017, a guy named Rich Allison tried to get into an LGP event in San Diego and wasn’t allowed in.
Salon reports, “As his complaint carefully noted, he was forced to drink in the main room of the bar and was charged the regular drink price instead of the discount those in the event room received. A month later, a man named George St. George did the same thing at an event that didn’t serve alcohol, with the same results, a few miles up the West Coast in Santa Monica.”
Both men then turned to San Diego-based “lawyer” Alfred Rava, a guy with a long history of filing lawsuits on behalf of men claiming sexual discrimination in California, to sue not only LGP, but Wasserman personally, as well as six other women who help organize LGP events.
It’s clear to Wasserman that the men insisting on getting into LGP’s events are doing it purely to shut their organization down, not because of any actual interest in attending the events. It’s clear, because when she changed the policy to allow men at one point…they didn’t end up attending. She explained to Salon, “They asked if they could come in and they were told yes, and they walked away. They didn’t want to go.”
Le sigh.
Here’s the sad part. Rava often gets financial settlements in his cases precisely because he targets people and organizations without the resources to fight back over a lengthy court battle. That’s what happened to Ladies Get Paid, though both Wasserman and Rava signed confidentiality agreements, preventing Wasserman from talking about the settlement.
She says simply, “We just didn’t have the money to fight.”
But Ladies Get Paid is determined to continue to provide support to its 20,000 members in all 50 U.S. states and 60 countries. However, they need your help to do it. They’re currently doing a crowdfund over at iFundWomen to recoup the costs of their legal fees and get out from under the huge financial burden this garbage lawsuit forced them to have to suffer and “keep the lights on.”
Wasserman is thrilled that after about six months of not being able to publicly discuss the legal proceedings at all, she’s now at least able to talk about what she and the company have been through to their supportive membership and community.
“This is part of a bigger movement that’s going on — you know, the backlash to women who get too loud,” she says. “I’m so happy I finally get to talk about it.”
Do you hear that, douchebro “activists?” You’re never going to shut women up.
(image: screencap)
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