As in the Alamo Drafthouse is more than welcome to have a women's night event for a particular movie, but if they refuse men at the door solely for their gender, that is illegal.
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/alamo-drafthouse-admi...
Can you articulate a difference between "targeting" and "discriminating", other than one being legal and one being illegal?
If one had a list of proxies for every ethnicity and individually assigned all but one would it qualify as legal targeting or illegal discrimination?
Would this format derived from US ethnicity census be legal: [x] White [] Black or African American [x] American Indian or Alaska Native [x] Asian or Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
but a query of 'exclude "Black or African American"' be considered illegal even if they both map to an abbreviated form of hexadecimal B? Although it could be argued that by making the discriminators have to work harder to figure out how to exercise bigotry in advertising is a reasonable baseline.
The spirit of the law is clear but I wonder about the mechanics of it for avoiding all of the gross loopholes and technicalities and enforceability. Just advertising home listings in 'Farmer's Weekly' (for sake of example assuming it has an overwhelmingly white subscriber base) for selling an exurban house wouldn't prove discriminatory intent and short of memos giving racist directives to the marketing department being released.
I live in Austin and support the Drafthouse's lighthearted attempt to offer women an opportunity to enjoy themselves by themselves.
I am not a lawyer but it always struck me as unfair to a whole gender to treat them differently when they want to enter nightclubs. But of course this policy is also very ageist, biased against heavyset people etc. So do we ban that as well, since it's not something people can control?
The issue is that nobody is really going to be bothered to spend the money to haul those things into court.
If I'm willing to spend that much money, I can apply that same amount of money and wind up using it far more effectively than getting into a specific club or gym.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/judge-rules-nightclub-en...
http://musicfeeds.com.au/news/dude-sues-melbourne-nightclub-...
Even a place which excludes men openly is allowed to operate, though this is borderlin. Lucille Roberts was a successful chain of female-only gyms advertising itself nationwide as just for women.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/04/women-only-social-c...