Case Overview, Women Athletics and Title IX


This document provides background information and summarizes the debate over women athletics and Title IX. The links to the left will lead you to public documents that we have found.

           Certainly one of the great successes of the women's rights movement is the expanded participation of women in organized sports. Part of the success in athletics reflects the enormous change in American culture that took place in the last thirty-five years or so. Just as more parents began to encourage their daughters to believe they could aspire to any job men traditionally held, so too did they encourage their daughters to participate in sports and to make it an important part of their lives. Yet there was also an important legal context that spurred this aspect of gender equality forward. Title IX has become synonymous with women's participation in school-based sports programs. Title IX is a section of the Education Amendments of 1972, passed by Congress as part of a larger education package. Title IX's language says simply, "No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid."
           Although everyone is for women's equality in the abstract, putting the principle into effect has not been without controversy. The disparity between men and women's programs at many colleges was enormous. Title IX requires opportunities for men and women to participate to be proportionate to their percentages in terms of enrollment. If women are 50 percent of the students enrolled at a school, then that institution needa to offer roughly 50 percent of the total positions on all its sports teams to women athletes. For many schools this required a major sea change. A men's football program, a sport for which there is no analogous team for women, can have 80 members. If there is a junior varsity, that can be another 60 male athletes. Thus for many colleges, there was a need to expand the number of women's sport teams beyond the number that existed before Title IX. A new women's lacrosse team might be added, or a junior varsity added to a sport where there was only a women's varsity team.
           Although adding women's teams was far preferable, some schools chose to cut selected men's teams as well to free up funds as well as to balance the male/female numbers. Although such cuts were never widespread, they rankled nevertheless. The intent of the law was to broaden opportunities for women, not to reduce them for men. A Washington lobbyist working on this issue noted also that colleges may not "just cut teams, but sometimes they'll cut athletic scholarships for both men and women to save money so they can start up a new female athletic sports team."
           Shortly after the Bush administration took office, a lawsuit antagonistic to Title IX was filed by aggrieved male wrestlers and alumni who had lost their college teams to cutbacks. They claimed that the law led to discrimination against smaller sports. Wrestling is vulnerable because few women wrestle so a school could abolish the men's team without having to deal with the equity issues that would arise if there was a women's team. To address ongoing concerns about Title IX, the Department of Education established a commission to study the practical consequences of the law. The Commission on Opportunity in Athletics was formed in the summer of 2002 and reported back in early 2003. The Commission made 25 recommendations, 10 of which failed to receive unanimous support. The Bush administration didn't embrace the report and implemented little of what was recommended. Instead, it publicly embraced Title IX and the Department of Education issued a three-page clarification that attempted to better explain the current implementation standards.