The Wing—a club for female professionals to work, network, take meetings, take a shower, and discuss the finer points of Harvey Weinstein and other issues that represent the realities of being a woman with a career in 2017—is finally opening the doors of a new location. The new digs in New York City’s SoHo evokes a Wes Anderson film, with its palette of saturated malt pinks, turquoise blues, and sunny yellows. Only women authors line the shelves of its community library and only works by female artists hang on its walls. The 10,000 square-foot co-working space officially opens for business on October 30, so if you’re one of the 8,000 people currently on the Wing’s wait list, congrats! You might have a chance of getting in this time.
It’s The Wing‘s first real expansion since launching in a different Manhattan neighborhood a year ago, but by early 2018 the company is hoping to have a total of four locations, including one in our nation’s capital. The ample square footage in the SoHo space allows the organization to try new things, including renting out small offices to companies that want to operate out of The Wing. The goal is to foster a community that is supportive and welcoming.
“Even though these women, a lot of them, haven’t met before, they feel really comfortable opening up to each other about personal things that you wouldn’t just [talk about at work],” says The Wing’s cofounder Audrey Gelman. “We’ve had discussions around a number of things like anxiety and pressure and mental health and around the Harvey Weinstein stuff and we had an event where women came and shared their own experiences and the intense emotions they were going through with all of that.” That event was called “Fuck Harvey Weinstein.”
Gelman and her cofounder Lauren Kassan are offering a place for women to not only take refuge from the man’s world we live in, but also strategize about fighting against it. In this year of all years, that sounds like utopia.
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