<p>sounds like it’s actually a matter of perceived jurisdiction:</p>
<p>“At Princeton, Yale and Brown, which require that private clubs admit members without regard to their sex, women may join established clubs. But at Harvard, where in the 1980’s the independently run finals clubs chose to sever ties with the university rather than go coed, women had to start their own groups. (In 1990 a female student lodged a complaint against the Fly with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, which ruled that it had no jurisdiction.)” </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/fashion/20SORO.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=7965a1ac701967ba&ex=1266555600&partner=rssuserland[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/fashion/20SORO.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=7965a1ac701967ba&ex=1266555600&partner=rssuserland</a> (attributing the recent growth in sororities and female-only clubs at harvard to a “desire to address age-old discrepancies at Harvard between social opportunities available to men and to women” and characterizing it as “a reaction to the dismal state of social options for women at the college, which is still dominated by eight musty, male-only finals clubs with names like the Porcellian and the Fly.”)</p>