When Ruby Tuesday put out the call to employees all over the country for summer workers at its location in Park City, Utah, in 2013, applications came rolling in from far and wide. Among those who wanted to apply for the gig with free housing and paid expenses were Oregon employee Andrew Herrera and Missouri employee Joshua Bell. But there was a catch: The chain was only hiring women for the jobs to avoid having to figure out coed housing.

Bell and Herrera, feeling like they were missing out on more money and work experience, complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the federal agency in charge of combating workplace discrimination. They claimed the restaurant was discriminating against them because of their gender. The EEOC agreed that the men had been unfairy discriminated against because they were men, and some experts and activists are saying that may actually be a good thing for women.

On Thursday the agency filed a lawsuit against Ruby Tuesday arguing that the sex-specific hiring practices violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and “deprived individuals of employment opportunities and otherwise adversely affected their status as internal applicants.”

At first glance it might be tough for anyone who knows how far women still have to go for workplace equality to feel sympathy for these guys—women famously earn much less than men on average, even in traditionally female-dominated fields. Some women experience discrimination when they try to take maternity leave. Men just out of college with the same degrees and jobs still make more than women, and the higher a woman rises in business, the less likely she is to be paid as much as her male counterparts.

But while men aren’t discriminated against nearly as often as women are, they definitely experience workplace harassment and unequal treatment. Between 2010 and 2013, men brought more than 16 percent of the sexual harassment charges the EEOC recieved.

Fighting these incidents can serve a critical role in protecting all workers from discrimination, especially in jobs such as restaurant work—low-wage employment in which women are often exploited.

Making women’s jobs available to men could improve overall labor conditions, too. “Jobs constructed as being for women pay less, have fewer promotional opportunities, and often, part of job is to be sexually available to male clients,” said Noah Zatz, a UCLA law professor who specializes in employment and labor law. Busting up that single-sex monopoly in waitressing, in-flight service, and nursing, for example, could be a strategy for “disrupting the ways jobs are disadvantageous to women.”

The preeminent case in which men sued to push back against a company hiring only women was a lawsuit three men brought against Hooters, the restaurant chain known for busty waitresses in tank tops and short shorts. Though sexy women were at the center of the Hooters image, the company eventually settled with the disgruntled men for $3.75 million in 1997 and agreed to allow men to apply for bartender and host positions.

Still, what Ruby Tuesday allegedly did was extreme. “It’s rare to see an explicit example of sex discrimination like Ruby Tuesday’s internal job announcement,” EEOC San Francisco Regional Attorney William R. Tamayo said in a statement. “This suit is a cautionary tale to employers that sex-based employment decisions are rarely justified, and are not consistent with good business judgment.”

Cases like these often rely on “all sorts of stereotypes about who is right for different jobs,” said Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center. “Stereotypes that, 50 years after Title VII, we should be beyond.”

When you look at how hiring practices like these could affect women, it’s even easier to understand why this case is significant.

“The idea that a company would come up with an outright bar excluding men from applying to a job—if the EEOC didn’t take steps to stop that, what would be next?” Goss Graves asked. “Could you have companies who say we’re not going to hire women because this is a job with a lot of gross harassment?”

Or could women be denied employment because the work facility doesn’t have a separate bathroom? Plenty of other work situations could involve living onsite. The concern, according to Goss Graves, is that this could be a grounds for discriminatory hiring.

“It’s important that the EEOC is taking this type of case and making clear that it’s not OK to set up a structure like this.” she said.

We’ve reached out to Ruby Tuesday for comment and will update this story if we hear back.