Title IX

In 2007, Title IX turned 35.  Carol Guensburg, former senior editor for the Journalism Center, wrote this backgrounder looking at how Title IX's impact extended well beyond athletics. Guensburg is now freelance reporter and editor. This piece was originally published on 6.12.07.  

Title IX, widely associated with female parity on the playing field, marked its 35th anniversary June 23, 2007.

Sports sociologist Mary Jo Kane calls it “one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation.... In one generation, we’ve gone from young women hoping there is a team to young women hoping they make the team. They grow up with an entitlement to sports – and so do their parents,” says Kane, who directs the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sports.

Today, it’s common for girls to tug on soccer shin guards, shoot hoops or dash around bases. But the law primarily was designed to protect females – as well as boys – from running into obstacles in education and on their later career paths. ;

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal funding. It covers the learning environment, vocational and career education, access to higher education, recruitment, employment and sexual harassment, as well as athletics.

Despite progress in sports, “we’re still struggling on a whole host of fronts,” says Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel for the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit center does litigation, lobbying and public education around issues such as the underrepresentation of girls in science and math, pregnancy discrimination in schools and “making sure girls aren’t being tracked into low-wage, low-skill careers” like cosmetology, Chaudhry says. NWLC produced a July 2009 fact sheet on schools' gender equity obligations during the economic downturn.

In fiscal 2006, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights received 670 complaints related to Title IX. Of those, 144 involved athletics. The rest pertained to “sexual harassment, discrimination in admissions, recruitment, discipline, assignment of students, program and support services, employment and other issues,” a spokesman wrote in an e-mail.

Title IX grew out of an executive order that barred federal contractors from sex discrimination in hiring. In 1969, Bernice R. Sandler was a University of Maryland doctoral student and part-time lecturer in education, frustrated that she wasn’t considered for a full-time position. She was the first to recognize a possible civil rights violation by her employer, because most universities receive federal funds. She contacted the Department of Labor and set off a series of hearings that flushed out other complaints and led to the legislation.

Sandler has worked on Title IX, and periodic challenges, ever since. Now 79 and a senior scholar with the nonprofit Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington, D.C., she expresses concern about single-sex classes as an educational objective. “When you have separation, the chances are great that they’re not equal,” she contends.

Chaudhry, at the law center, echoes that concern. “There continue to be lots of inequities at the high school and college levels,” particularly over disparities between boys’ baseball and girls’ softball, Chaudhry says. She negotiated one such case (in 2006) with the school board of Prince George’s County, Md., just outside Washington, D.C. The model settlement ensures gender equity throughout the county’s middle and high school athletic programs, requiring improvements to fields and facilities, funding proportionate to the number of male and female participants, and equality in all aspects including scheduling, uniforms and publicity.

Participation levels

Title IX indisputably opened players’ rosters to young women. High school girls’ participation exploded from less than 300,000 in 1982 to more than 2.8 million in 2002, the Newark Star-Ledger reported on May 20, 2007.

In higher education, fewer than 30,000 women competed in intercollegiate sports pre-Title IX. Today, 160,000 play in the National Collegiate Athletic Association and another 50,000 represent non-NCAA schools and junior colleges, says John Cheslock, author of a report on collegiate sports participation. An assistant professor at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, Cheslock prepared the report for the Women’s Sports Foundation, an advocacy group.  (Editors Note: Cheslock authored a report in September 2008 on Money, Race, and Gender issues in collegiate sports.)

Cheslock found that college women’s participation increased significantly in the late 1990s but by 2000 slowed to a level of growth more comparable with men’s (11,000 new slots a year for women and 10,000 for men). He noted that until 2000, schools weren’t required to submit participation data to the federal government, so conflicting data emerged. The College Sports Council – a national coalition of coaches, athletes, parents and fans supporting Title IX reforms – in March released a study showing “steep and steady declines in college athletic opportunities for men” since 1981.      

Cheslock added that women accounted for 15 percent of all college athletes in 1972 and 42 percent today – still shy of the 56 percent share of female undergraduates. “Proportionality” is the most commonly used of three options through which a school can show Title IX compliance.             

•  Story idea: Every school district and every university must appoint an officer to oversee Title IX compliance and grants, Sandler notes. Who is it? How – and how often – does the officer assess equity? What are the officer’s other duties? Consider a profile.     

Employment opportunities

Though Title IX grew out of employment inequity, a consequence of its passage is proportionately fewer females coaching girls’ and women’s teams today. The NCAA (in 2007) reported that the percentage of women head coaches for women’s teams slid from nearly 44 percent [43.6] to just over 40 [40.1] between 1995-96 and 2005-06. Men also have moved into officiating women’s games, drawn by competitive pay.       

•  Story idea: What do coaching and officiating staffs look like in your district?  

Impact on families

Kane, the sports sociologist, credits Title IX with expanding opportunities in a different arena: family relations. She says “this connection between dads and daughters around sports” has blossomed.          

Michael A. Messner, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, also sees benefits for boys accustomed to female athletes. Messner, who has two teenage sons, says boys learn “respect for women’s strength and power and competitiveness.”           

He’s writing a book on de facto sex segregation among youth athletic league volunteers, one area that Title IX’s attitudinal shift hasn’t yet reached. Dads still predominantly coach and moms coordinate. Messner is “interested in contradictions,” he explains.

• Story idea: Who’s on the sidelines and who’s on the field?