Marquette: Allentown Arts Museum and SOTA Must Stop Gender Discrimination.

Blogger's Note: Allentown Art Museum is expected to announce changes in its mission at a "big reveal" today. John Marquette, a former docent there, has a "big reveal" of his own. If you belong to the penis club, your options are limited. Here's John's story. 

Imagine for a moment that you’re the director of a highly-respected cultural institution in Pennsylvania. It’s in the heart of a rapidly changing city, with new businesses and apartment buildings rising to the left and right. You recognize that it’s important to continue to stay relevant to the new arrivals and you do outreach to the newcomers even as you encourage your long-time financial supporters to keep visiting and bringing their checkbooks. An affiliated organization, whose members volunteer their time and who also contribute generously, meets in your conference rooms, hosts events, and shares your postal address. They even use your accounting firm!

There’s only one problem with these public-minded folks. They don’t allow a specific minority to be members. Still, they do contribute a lot of money and you can’t afford to hire people to replace the volunteer work they do. So you just keep the matter of discrimination on the down low, right?

What if it were not a minority that was being discriminated against, but an entire gender? If you are the Allentown Art Museum and the Society of the Arts is your affiliated organization, which only allows women as members, discrimination is overlooked, even tolerated.

On October 10, an Allentown Art Museum Facebook post shared news and information about a fundraising event held by the Society of the Arts. The Society, usually referred to as “SOTA”, is a major contributor to the work of the museum, providing it with funding and many of its volunteers, including its docents.

I was fortunate enough to be a docent for the museum for a few years, but was unable to join SOTA for two reasons. First, I have obligations which preclude me from offering the time that membership requires. More important to this article, however, is that SOTA membership is exclusive to women. SOTA provides the lion’s share of volunteers to the museum, especially in roles such as docents. Docents provide guided tours of the museum’s permanent and special collections, and are, for most visitors to the museum, its public face.

Since I ended my volunteering with the museum as one of the few “community docents” at the end of last year, all of those docent faces are female. The museum’s website gives no indication that it seeks community volunteers, showing seekers the word "SOTA" in search results.

SOTA’s website, on the other hand, offers a wide range of interesting and challenging volunteer opportunities in all areas of the museum’s operations. SOTA volunteers can offer tours, work in the development and curatorial areas, plan and staff museum events, and more. Again, SOTA members become the face of the museum.

Sadly for the Lehigh Valley, the faces SOTA offers to museum visitors are exclusively female. While the museum includes in its current employment post a non-discrimination disclaimer (“The Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley is an equal opportunity, equal access employer, fully committed to achieving a diverse and inclusive workplace.”), this group is neither diverse nor inclusive.

There are other avenues to volunteering with the museum. The Allentown Art Museum Auxiliary, founded in 1946 with membership open to women and men alike, has placed its member-volunteers in the museum shop, and more recently has extended its reach into the development and curatorial departments. While these positions are important to the daily operation of the museum, they do not rise to the level that many men in the Lehigh Valley are precluded by their gender from filling.

SOTA was founded about 20 years after the auxiliary. In its more than 50 years of service to the museum, it has contributed more than just its members’ time and effort. Funds raised by SOTA have made many years of free Sunday admissions possible for Valley residents. Other funds are directed to acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collection. At least two SOTA members sit on the museum’s board of trustees. These talented, hard-working women have contributed to cultural environment of the Lehigh Valley. For all of their work, creativity, intelligence, and funding, I am and will remain grateful.

At the same time I praise SOTA for their dedication, I glance - sometimes repeatedly - at the calendar to remind myself that it is 2017. In my years volunteering as a community docent and visiting other museums around the United States, none staff and train their volunteers from an organization with membership restricted by gender. In fact, when I described the Allentown Art Museum’s practice to working docents, I got reactions ranging from the raise of an eyebrow to more obvious expressions of shock that blatant discrimination was still occurring in public museums.

There is a remedy: SOTA could decide at its next board meeting to open its membership to persons without regard to gender. At the same time, SOTA appears from its Facebook description to its common mailing address and accounting firm with the Allentown Art Museum to be an operating arm of the the museum itself. If that is the case, then it is possible that agreeing to accept Federal, state, and other funding entails signing a statement of non-discrimination. If it is the practice of the Museum to have any volunteer provided by a gender-restricted organization or operating area, it is engaged in discrimination.

While I was a community docent, I was encouraged by SOTA members and SOTA leadership to bring more men into the program. What they were asking me, on one hand, was to help diversify the docent group and provide a wider range of perspectives consistent with the museum's high standards. On the other hand, it felt as if they were asking me to provide a separate-but-equal opportunity for men I could encourage to enroll in the training. The candidates I referred never heard back from the museum nor did their possible further contacts with SOTA convince them to begin the training process.

I believe that the Allentown Art Museum has a collection which is remarkable for a city its size. The traveling exhibitions it brings to the area and the shows it curates locally enrich all of us in the Lehigh Valley. I was personally enriched by my work with SOTA and with museum visitors, and came to see the works in the museum through new eyes. Unfortunately, I can no longer continue to contribute my time or many of my charitable dollars to an organization which does not offer the same opportunity to volunteer candidates as it does to people with checkbooks. I encourage SOTA and the Allentown Art Museum to end its gender-restricted practices and seek the best volunteers the region has to offer.

About John Marquette: Marquette is the author of “In Arch’s Footsteps”, a guide to Housenick Park, as well as many Wikipedia articles and a 2014 op-ed in the Morning Call on the management of the National Museum of Industrial History. He lives in Bethlehem.