Title IX Turns Thirty-Five
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The athletics department at Stanford can appear deceivingly ideal. While consistently home to champions, men and women alike, Stanford cannot evade the subtle challenges of gender equality affecting many college athletics departments today.
The questions surrounding gender equality in sports will be the focus of a spring conference hosted by the Stanford Center for Ethics entitled “Title IX at 35, Midlife Crises, Midcourse Challenges.” A daylong series of panels followed by a discussion with tennis legend and founder of the Women’s Sport Foundation, Billie Jean King, will address nuances in the anti-gender-discrimination law, Title IX, a bill that celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2007.
Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act in 1972, requires all federally funded education “activities or programs” to provide equal opportunities and demonstrate equal outcomes in gender participation.
The bill has proved itself largely successful at increasing female participation in recent decades. While women used to comprise less than 15% of all intercollegiate athletes, with only 16,000 participants thirty years ago, today that number has quadrupled to 180,000, or, 44% of all athletes.
However, the picture today falls far from perfect. Even at well-funded schools such as Stanford, where females make up 49% of the student-athletes and 51% of the undergraduate student body, women’s sports are still under-funded relative to men’s. Nationwide, women’s teams receive only 30% of the funds accorded to men’s teams.
Football presents the main problem, according to The Center for Ethics Director, Professor Deborah Rhode. Football earns revenue only at a handful of Division I schools, yet demands a disproportionate share of the money, and varsity slots, available for athletics. Colleges will add new women’s teams to compensate for the imbalance posed by the shear number of athlete’s recruited for football.
To ensure compliance with Title IX, most colleges will also cut men’s sports which do not draw the crowds that football entertains. The NCAA reports that between 1988-89 and 2001-02, colleges across all three divisions cut 99 wrestling teams, 53 tennis teams, 33 rifle teams and 32 gymnastics teams.
Many question the fairness of cutting men’s teams to comply with Title IX, including Dick Gould, Stanford’s former director of tennis, and Dena Evans, former head coach of the Women’s Cross Country Program at Stanford. While they recognize that the opportunities to participate must be in place before women develop an equally strong interest in athletics as men, both Gould and Professor Rhode remarked that relatively less qualified or interested women may end up with scholarships and places on teams under the current system.
“It may not always make sense to shortchange talented and committed men to provide underutilized opportunities for women,” says Professor Rhode.
Dena Evans also noted that the women’s sports which are created to fill the funding gap, such as archery, rugby, synchronized swimming, and equestrian, have relatively high preparation costs prior to college because of travel and equipment. Consequently, she says, “the new opportunities for scholarships and teams are going to those who are already well-off.”
Unfortunately, the politics around college football programs make them difficult to change. But Professor Rhode expects the conference will address the problem. “We have to decide whether [football] deserves the resources that it’s now getting,” she says.
Title IX applies to more than just student athletes. The bill also unintentionally altered trends in female coaching. Data from a study conducted by the Stanford Center for Ethics shows that between 1970 and 2005, the percentage of female teams being coached by females dropped from 90% to 42%. Overall, only 17.7% of all sports teams today are coached by women.
The influx in resources going to women’s teams has made coaching them more demanding. The rigorous time commitment involved in recruitment, travel, and summer camps has made it increasingly difficult for women with childbearing and childrearing commitments to balance work with family.
Dena Evans, the mother of two small children, found the expansion of the sports timeframe beyond the traditional season particularly challenging. The most intense period of coaching once limited to several months, now, “happens sometimes to be all year round,” she said.
Men also engage in child care at home, but the burden of caring for the next generation is still more likely to affect mothers than fathers. Indeed, demographic data collected by the Stanford Center for Ethics reveals that over half the women coaches (53.5%) are single, while only one in four (28.8%) men coaches are single. It also found that only one in four women coaches (28.6%) have children, while over half men coaches (55.9%) have children.
The Center for Ethics found that 91% of female collegiate coaches reported playing their respective sports in college—in comparison to 66.7% of men. Also, only 35.3% of men coaches reported being either “all-conference” or “all-American” athletes in college—in comparison to 63.8% of women coaches.
While Title IX may have created unintended barriers for women in the coaching profession, proponents of the bill recently expanded its reach to help women achieve equality from a young age. Sparked by outrage at the unequal state of softball versus baseball fields in public parks, Assembly Bill 2404, signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2004, now holds entire communities to the same standards of equal opportunity for athletics as educational institutions.
AB 2404 follows an interventionist strategy. According to a study by Linda Bunker at the University of Virginia, if a girl does not participate in sports by the time she is 10, there is only a 10% chance she will participate when she is 25. By requiring communities to provide equal access to athletics at a young age, the bill aims to foster an interest in sports that will later contribute to women’s utilization of opportunities in high school and college.
Title IX may also affect other educational areas with gender gaps. Last spring, Stanford Chemistry Professor Richard Zare called attention to the disparity between women’s representation among science majors graduates versus their presence in the upper levels of academia.
According to the National Science Foundation, while women constitute nearly 40% of chemistry graduate students and post-docs, they represent less than 13% of faculty in the top 50 U.S. chemistry departments. Professor Zare, reporting for Chemical and Engineering News in May, explained the discrepancy as a result of the educational infrastructure.
Women’s numbers decline in higher level positions due to “subtle but real discrimination, the failure to take into account the asymmetric burdens of childbirth and child care as well as elder care, and the failure to structure faculty jobs to better reflect a balanced lifestyle,” writes Professor Zare.
Whether or not these recent trends follow the original lettering of Title IX, advocates for equal opportunity are carrying out reforms in its name from the bottom, in early childhood with bills like AB 2404, and from the top, in adulthood with propositions to re-structure professions to accommodate workers with families. In any case, the conference in April will have a full plate discussing the progress, modern challenges, and new applications, of Title IX.
