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As of last July, only three of the Pine Valley Golf Club’s 700 members were women, Acting Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said in announcing a state Division of Civil Rights complaint against the historically male-dominated club in Camden County on Wednesday, April 27.
It took a DCR investigation to get the club to relax restrictions on women to golf and access its facilities, Platkin said.
Pine Valley also “has used discriminatory restrictive covenants to prevent women from owning houses on the club’s land unless they co-own a house with a man, and has adopted employment policies that discriminated on the basis of sex and gender,” the attorney general said.
The complaint also cites "a continuing lack of women employees at the club, noting that women make up fewer than 4 percent of the club’s employees, and that most work in such positions as dishwasher, luncheonette staffer and laundry worker."
“Gender-based discrimination has no place in New Jersey, period,” Platkin said.
“Failure to provide equal access to persons of all genders in housing, employment and places of public accommodation has consequences,” added DCR Deputy Director Rosemary DiSavino.
Distinctly private clubs can play by a different set of rules when it comes to public accommodation, state authorities said.
The Pine Valley Golf Club can’t, however, because it’s “so deeply intertwined with the former Borough of Pine Valley,” Platkin said.
The club previously owned all land in the borough of Pine Valley, “effectively controlled its operations and was the primary recipient of services and benefits provided by its government,” the attorney general noted.
This year, it merged into the neighboring borough of Pine Hill, he said.
The club says it lifted all restrictions on membership and use of its facilities based on sex or gender by the spring of 2021, after the state investigation began.
The complaint filed in court, however, “alleges an extensive history of past LAD violations at the 108-year-old Club, resulting in a legacy of inequality that lingers today,” Platkin said.
Among other things, the complaint points to a continued dearth of female members and discrimination against women by tying club membership to the ability to own or lease property.
“The Club’s long-standing men-only membership policy, coupled with its use of restrictive ‘members only’ deed covenants, disqualified women from being eligible to own or lease any of the 19 private dwellings that sit on club-owned land,” Platkin said.
“While the club purportedly did away with its restrictive covenants on property leases during DCR’s investigation, the club also has said it no longer plans to enter into any new leases of cClub land, effectively preventing women from purchasing any of the homes in the future,” he added.
The complaint also accuses the club of employment discrimination through:
- Recruiting primarily based on word-of-mouth referrals from the club’s workforce of mostly men, which “deprived people who do not identify as men of the opportunity to learn of employment opportunities” and resulted in the Club being staffed almost exclusively by men;
- Including an unlawful policy in the club’s employee handbook that prohibited men – but not women – from wearing earrings;
- Including a policy that forbade employees from discussing their pay.
Legal Specialist Kaley Lentini of DCR’s Strategic Initiatives & Enforcement Unit, and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Olshansky of the Affirmative Civil Rights and Labor Enforcement Section are handling the case.
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