Keep calm and carry on. A motto Rawan Yahya followed three years ago after a gym trial ended in disappointment.
“I wish someone had told me before, that’s what I wish, but I don’t want to make it a big, big deal,” she said.
Initially, Yahya enjoyed letting her hair down in the gym’s women-only section until “An employee told me that male [workers] watch the women’s cameras,” she said.
Yahya said this was not verbally disclosed to her before signing up.
For a lot of women, this would be a mild inconvenience, but for then 29-year-old Yahya, it was a conflict with faith.
“My goal was to work out without my hijab. But it is what it is,” she said. “Not everyone is knowledgeable about different religions.”
The gym chain did not respond to requests for comment at this time.
Since she already paid for a three-month trial, Yahya said she continued using the gym with her hijab.
This time Yahya took to the co-ed section, where she said she felt uncomfortable doing certain movements, like bending over or stretching with men around.
Her concern is common among women, according to an international research study about women’s body image in the gym from a science journal called PLOS One.
According to the 2025 study, 62 per cent of women reported feeling “sexualized” or “self-conscious” in a co-ed gym.
For many women these feelings go past the dumbbells.
According to a Statistics Canada report released on March 31, 2026, 21 per cent of women had experienced at least one form of unwanted sexual behaviour in the past year.
This includes unwanted sexual attention, or physical contact according to the Government of Canada.
To combat this discomfort women-only gyms act as a safe environment that caters to women’s needs according to totalfitness.
They are meant to exist beside co-ed or mixed gym spaces said the U.K. gym-chain in their 2025 report.
Although some gyms advertise “women-only sections,” they’re not always women-exclusive spaces.
Lina Wen, a martial arts coach and founder of the Sisters’ Fitness Club, says male workers may go into women-only sections to fix equipment or in cases like Yahya’s, watch their security cameras.
“That’s a very common issue within commercial gyms,” Wen said, “[At Sister’s Fitness Club] we literally lock the doors, turn off the cameras, we shut the windows and pull the blinds down,” she added.
While these issues make some women apprehensive about joining a gym, they are part of the reason why Wen began her journey as “Lil coach Lina” in 2024.
With over a decade of Muay Thai and fitness experience, Wen kick-started women-only martial arts lessons at the Masjid ar-Rahman, Mosque of Mercy.
“I remember seeing brothers’ jujitsu program, brothers wrestling programs and then like literally nothing for girls,” Wen said. “Literally nothing for the sisters,” she added.
Her lessons started from the ground up with just bare hands and feet. But something clicked when months of drawing crowds and hours of volunteering were rewarded with equipment.
“I was like, screw it, I’m going to open up a separate place,” Wen said.
With that, Wen started the Sisters’ Fitness Club to create a safe space for all women.
When men are not around, the club will host sessions at SAF Performance, a physical fitness program in Centretown West.
Wen said SAF Performance let her split the facility’s rent which eased some of the financial strain from buying equipment out of pocket.
But time is money.
Wen said there were some weeks where she poured 20-30 hours into the club on top of her nine to five.
Even so, she says a small minority of the Ottawa community pushed back.
“[Some people] didn’t respect me as they would if I were a man and that is super normal in any business for women as an entrepreneur.”
“Even though I broke down, God brought me back up every single time. That’s how I kept going, and that’s how I keep going, and that’s how I will always be.”
Lina Wen
Women-only spaces have faced discourse on the internet. While some people think they’re a step towards inclusion, others think they’re discriminatory.
Susan Ursel, a litigator for over 40 years, says women-only spaces fall under special interest organizations in the Human Rights Code of Ontario.
It states that these spaces are permitted, but they have certain restrictions depending on the kind of business.
Ursel said that women-only gyms may cite public decency as a defence. “It’s the same section used to defend sex seperated change rooms,” she said.
But businesses like women-only cafés may be more difficult to defend says Ursel.
Ottawa welcomed its first women-only café and lounge late last year.The owner who goes by Savanna,announced Casadonna’s official opening on Instagram Dec. 8, 2025.
Casadonna’s case would be hard to argue since it is a grey area Ursel explained.
“The café would have to provide some kind of religious, educational, philanthropic or social benefit to women to not be discriminatory,” she said.
While Casadonna’s Instagram shows they’ve hosted events grounded in religion and social connection, Ursel says intention matters.
“Is it a women-only café because you want to exclude men, or is it a women-only café because you want to help women?”
Aya Shalak, a mental health coach and a good friend of Savanna’s, says Ursel is not the first to question the intent of the café.
“It’s not meant to exclude men, it’s meant to create an environment where women can embrace femininity and be themselves,” Shalak said.
“You might see a woman act completely differently in a mixed space than she might be in a women-only space,” she added.
According to Halifax’s Safe City & Safe Public Spaces Program, women often change their behaviour in public spaces as a way to protect themselves.
Whether it be a gym or a café, women-owned businesses have their own set of challenges.
“They used to tell [Savanna], “‘Clearly this has never been done in Ottawa before because it would never work,’” said Shalak.
There is an unconscious bias from both investors and the public when evaluating women, said Kanwal Bokhari, who has a PhD in business administration from the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.
As a PhD student, Bokhari lead the university’s Financial Feminism Investing Lab, a program that teaches women in business how to overcome barriers.
Originally, her research revolved around financial decision-making, but it took a turn after discovering gendered funding gaps.
Bokhari’s research from Bridging the Finance Gap for Women Entrepreneurs argues that women entrepreneurs face greater challenges when starting and running a business.
It says that women-owned businesses are less likely to apply for debt financing, but when they do, women receive less funding.
Part of the reason why bank loans, leases, trade credit and government funding offer women entrepreneurs less money is because of the way entrepreneurship is interpreted.
“Somehow entrepreneurship is associated with attributes like being rational, being heroic, being agentic, being a tough decision maker,” said Bokhari, “All these traits are typically associated with men.”
But the challenges do not stop there.
According to the 2025 study, women entrepreneurs face knowledge and capital gaps as well as lower survival rates.
The study says women-centred initiatives help regulate these challenges to an extent. It argues that there needs to be a change in national policy to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs.
Without this change comes the risk of reaffirming stereotypes.
“Theres this whole archetype that thinks entrepreneurship is male,” Bokhari said.
This line of thinking is being challenged by ‘girl boss’ feminism, a pop culture push to empower women in corporate and business spaces says an article from Harvard Political Review.
Alex Ketchum is an associate professor with the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill, with mixed feelings about the term.
She says that girl boss feminism falls short when the time comes to hold society accountable. “If a business fails, it becomes a personal failure as opposed to a systemic one,” Ketchum said.
Historically, women have been pushed out of business spaces, which has created generational financial knowledge gaps that ‘girl boss’ feminism tries to make up for, she explained.
“We need to empower women to be able to have these skill sets, and we also need to build confidence in women to take this on,” said Ketchum.
But to build on women’s confidence, women need supportive environments. For many women-only spaces act as exactly that.
Ketchum says, “I don’t think there’s such a thing as ‘too many’ women-only spaces.”
Neither does Rawan Yahya, who looks past her disappointing gym experience.
“I wish there were more women-only spaces in Ottawa,” she said.
Yahya said she thought she preferred women-only spaces since she grew up with them in Saudi Arabia.
But after her eighth year in Canada, Yahya said she prefers these spaces because they allow her to move comfortably without the fear of judgment.
As Ottawa continues to grow, Yahya continues to keep calm and carry on using women-only spaces.