After 200 years, women can join the Garrick. Now for the task of making it share power, not hoard it | Jemima Olchawski

Last night's membership vote is a step in the right direction, but this remains a closed, elite institution

Britain's old boys' club" suffered a blow last night. The Garrick Club - an exclusive gentlemen's club in central London and relic of some 19th-century fantasy of male dominance - voted to allow women to become members for the first time in almost 200 years. About 60% of the votes were in favour.

In the 21st century, there is simply no legitimate justification for the exclusion of women. There actually never was. That the Garrick Club's exclusionary policy has been so robustly defended in recent weeks speaks to a profound misogyny alive and well in Britain. What would including women do to the refined, rarefied air of the club? Contaminate it with our chit-chat? Our nagging? Would our feminine charms prove too much of a distraction?

The refrain of nothing to see here" is all too familiar to so many women. It's not a work meeting, it's just a couple of holes at the golf course. It's just blowing off steam. It's just a couple of drinks with the guys. We didn't think you would want to come. But it's not plausible to say that work doesn't happen in spaces like the Garrick, and that these aren't places where, even loosely, critical decisions are made. Clubs like the Garrick are built for soft networking, the sidebar conversations where real power coalesces, uninterrupted by pesky women. A sense that you belong among its exclusive cohort is in and of itself a means of sustaining male power.

The proof is in the revelation of the names of about 60 of the Garrick's most influential members. Senior civil servants, politicians, the head of MI6 (who subsequently resigned from the club), even King Charles. These men quite literally reign over the most powerful institutions of our country, places where women are consistently underrepresented and underserved. Rhetorically, they are committed to driving equality. Some of them tweet on International Women's Day. But these commitments ring very hollow when you realise that men in power choose to spend their spare time in a club that was founded in 1831, and has scarcely changed since.

We also have to consider what we lose when we keep women at the door. Do the 40% of Garrick members who voted against allowing women in believe that only men make worthy contributions to arts, politics, culture? These men would do well to consider what we miss out on when we fail to recognise women as equal contributors and thinkers, with the right and ability to converse, share ideas and shape culture. What might the world look like if women were treated as true equals in these conversations?

The question will be asked about women-only spaces. If men-only clubs must permit women, what of women's clubs? But there is a key difference. Men gathering in influential places to the exclusion of women is profoundly status quo. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. When senior politicians and policymakers take lunch together at the Garrick, they are reinforcing power structures that have existed for centuries. There are plenty of women-only spaces that will continue to exclude men, but they do so to resist power, not to hoard it. (For the record, the Fawcett Society welcomes and encourages our male allies to join us).

Last night's vote may be a step in the right direction, but of course there are still plenty of reasons for discomfort. The Garrick remains an elite club where only a chosen few are invited, and even fewer can afford membership. That's a conversation that we must have. But it's important that a majority of members have accepted that to continue to exclude women is harmful and self-defeating. Now the real work begins of actively including a diversity of women. And Garrick members, new and old, need to ask themselves what they are doing to share and distribute power fairly - not guard it among their own.

Jemima Olchawski is the chief executive of the Fawcett Society