The Wing Is a Womens Utopia. Unless You Work There. – The New York Times

Later that year, another employee who had attended the Ocasio-Cortez fund-raiser at Gelmans home tweeted a note of discomfort about the radical-chic gathering. When Gelman spied it late at night over a weekend, she summoned her to her office the next Monday morning. The employee deleted the tweet and apologized, and Gelman responded benevolently. Your intelligence and depth are beyond your years, Gelman wrote the employee in an email. Of the Wing, she said: I am honestly very down to hear your unvarnished opinions on it, and ideas you have to improve it and make it better. I really mean that. But a few months later, when the employee emailed Gelman to ask about raising wages, and then began to inquire among staff about their working conditions, a Wing disciplinary write-up signed by Kassan rebuked the employee for expressing negative views about an event at Audreys home, sending reactive emails directly to the C.E.O. and interrogating staff about their pay and benefits. The employee was warned that the company wanted to see a significant improvement in her impulsive and reactive behaviors or face corrective action up to and including termination.

Once, Gelman noticed a few dirty dishes in the beauty room of a club while Venus Williams was visiting the space, according to an employee who was working the event. She said Gelman shut the doors to the beauty room and raised her voice, saying a C.E.O. shouldnt have to clean. The employee left rattled and crying. Two employees who were present in the club that day confirmed that the employee tearfully described the incident to them shortly after it happened. (The Wing spokeswoman denied that it occurred.) Last year, Gelman told the website the Cut that the most fun Ive had in the last few months involved rolling up her sleeves and doing dishwashing shifts at the Wing. She washed three dishes and Instagrammed it, a former employee says.

On a recent Thursday morning, I followed a trail of curvy white Ws painted along a Williamsburg sidewalk up to the entrance of the Wings newest club. In the elevator, I witnessed a real-life Winglet meet-cute: One woman read auras for GOOP; the other made $45 soaps for GOOP; they bonded over a healer they both knew. An eager young Wing employee met me at the front desk, and then I headed into the pink belly of the club, where Audrey Gelman was waiting for me.

Gelman wore a golden Wing necklace and an inviting smile. Flanked by the Wings senior vice president for operations and an outside public-relations professional, she listened to the accounts of her employees and nodded thoughtfully. Despite their intention to build a womens utopia, she acknowledged, the ills of society at large had seeped in. Its hard to hear that people have had this experience, she said. These are familiar themes for us. Every employee concern, she assured me, had already been incorporated into a sweeping business recalibration. Even as it expanded, the Wing was overhauling its organizational structure, raising wages, extending benefits and instituting a code of conduct for members which, if violated, could result in the clipping of wings termination of membership.

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. Wing workers, who had for years raised those very issues internally, wondered why the Wing only seemed to acknowledge them as members spoke up and journalists circled. But when Gelman posted her mea culpa on Instagram, glowing reviews flooded into the comments: So important. I didnt 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.

As the start-up world has reeled from the dizzying falls of toxic male founders like Ubers Travis Kalanick and WeWorks Adam Neumann, it has set its sights on a new kind of hero figure. Female entrepreneurs are paraded in the press as saviors of the market, even though they still receive relatively paltry sums from venture-capital firms. In their hands, the tensions of capitalism may be laundered through feminist messaging and come out looking bright and new. At the very least, corporate feminism can be defended as an incremental good. 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.

When these women inevitably fail to secure female empowerment through retail offerings and exclusive hospitality experiences, it is suggested that it is perhaps sexist to criticize them. Men get away with so much. And yet this outpouring of sympathy rarely extends beyond the executive suite. When a feminist company falls short of its utopian vision, it is the workers who must toil to maintain the illusion. And they are women, too.

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The Wing Is a Womens Utopia. Unless You Work There. - The New York Times