Male and Female

Initiation into regular lodges is restricted to men, and basic principles of recognition stipulate that a Grand Lodge must have no masonic association with bodies admitting women, as the United Grand Lodge of England states. UGLE itself requires candidates to be men aged over 18, though it maintains a positive working relationship with two distinct single-sex women's obediences: the Order of Women Freemasons and the Honourable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons.

In the Craft, attempts to introduce women into lodge settings historically met with firm resistance. When ladies were admitted into the gallery during a festival of the Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary's Chapel) No. 1 in 1843, the lodge formally disavowed the act as an unauthorized innovation dangerous to the established safeguards of the Craft 3. Similarly, when Dr. Georges Martin advocated for mixed-gender lodges in France in 1891, the Symbolic Grand Lodge rejected the project 2. Opponents argued that imparting Masonic words and signs to women violated constitutional obligations, oaths of secrecy regarding candidate qualification, and the established decision of the majority of Masons 2.

These efforts nevertheless led to the creation of co-masonry (La Maçonnerie Mixte) in Paris in 1893 through Maria Desraimes and Dr. Martin, forming the body later known as Le Droit Humain 12. In the Scottish Rite, thirty degrees were superposed onto the Craft degrees of Le Droit Humain in 1900, governed by its own Supreme Council 1. The stance toward this mixed obedience varied across French bodies: the Grand Orient of France refused recognition and forbade affiliation with mixed lodges 1, whereas the Grand Lodge of France permitted male initiates of co-masonic lodges to enter its lodges through regularisation, and its Supreme Council allowed male co-masons to affiliate 1. Co-masonry subsequently spread globally as Universal Co-Freemasonry, particularly under Annie Besant in India and Great Britain, working its Craft degrees under the "Dharma working" 1.

In the Ancient and Primitive Rite, female participation was handled through distinct adoptive structures, such as Madam H. P. Blavatsky receiving the Degrees of the Rite of Adoption in 1877 2.