Advancing Gender Equality
IRAC plays an active and leading role in battling attempts by religious extremists to limit the participation and visibility of women in the public sphere in Israel. IRAC’s legal accomplishments include a Supreme Court ruling that made gender segregation on public transportation illegal, a class action suit against a public radio station that refused to put women on the air, effectively ending the practice of gender segregation in public health clinics and at funerals, an Attorney General report that strongly condemned gender segregation and ordered governmental ministries to address them, and a recent ruling forcing the Bet Shemesh municipality to remove so-called “modesty signs” from the streets. IRAC continues to safeguard the progress achieved so far and to confront new issues—currently, gender discrimination and segregation in the IDF and higher education, in which exclusionary practices have been enacted in order to encourage more Haredi men to participate, at the expense of women.
Israeli law prohibits gender segregation and the exclusion of women in public settings. However, due to pressure by certain extreme elements in the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community and the mistaken assumption that the entire Haredi public wants this type of segregation, it has become common to encounter public settings with a physical separation between men and women, the removal of women’s images, women banned from speaking or singing, or signs demanding that women observe extreme modesty standards. Despite these practices being not only illegal, but also immoral.
Thanks to IRAC:
Gender Exclusion on the walls of Israeli HMO has been rectified.
Gender segregation on public buses is illegal.
It is illegal for a flight attendant to ask a woman to change seats on a plane because of her gender.
Women in Bet Shemesh can walk freely without modesty signs, which aim to limit women’s dress and movement.