I will preface this by saying that I am a fan of women’s sports. I think that Title IX has helped bring the growth that we have seen with the women’s programs. However, I constantly hear complaints about the after effects of Title IX.
It is my understanding that Title IX requires a college to have around the same ratio of male to female athletic scholarships, as there are male to female students. They also require equal funding for the men’s teams and women’s teams.
This all seems fair on the surface, but there are several problems.
Basically the only revenue producing sports are men’s football, men’s basketball, men’s baseball, and women’s basketball. All the other sports get free rides off of these sports. Additionally, these sports usually are the only sports generating alumni donations. I can think of a few examples of donations being made to women’s softball but not many. However, by a far amount, most money is generated by football and men’s basketball.
Additionally, there is a far greater interest in athletics in males than females. In order to keep the number of scholarship athletes equal they do not add women, they simply drop men. All over the country there are examples of men's programs being dropped in order to comply with Title IX.
Also, there are no women's sports that compare with football. Football has the largest number of players and the most expensive equipment. They have already dropped the number of scholarships to 85.
Even at schools that comply, there are a number of men's programs that would like to be added, but can't because there is not a women's program to add along with it.
What is currently going on is clearly against the intention of the law as it was written. It was specifically intended to give women an equal opportunity to play sports at the collegiate level. What it has done is taken away the opportunity from men. Quota systems like this are completely unfair in my opinion.
I think that before Title IX 99% of the athletic scholarships in this countrey went to men.
I think that the women’s basketball programs which are moneymakers now would never have become so without Title IX.
I think that most posters to this board were still alive when the IOC was refusing to sanction a woman’s marathon because it was considered too strenuous.
I think that quotas are a poor answer but prejudice is a worse one.
I think that just last week I heard a nationally syndicated sports radio host referring to WNBA players as “heffers”.
I think that basing legislative solutions upon patterns in alumni contributions is short-sighted.
I think that no single woman’s sport at the major college level is granted 85 full shcolarships.
I think that you have misrepresented the solutions that Title IX requires. In particular, Title IX does not “require equal funding for the men’s teams and women’s teams,” nor does it require “around the same ratio of male to female athletic scholarships.” Both funding and scholarships are required to be roughly proportional to the representation of each sex in the student body.
Nothing in Title IX requires any school to drop a program. It simply prevents schools from allocating resources unfairly. Yes, if a school was significantly disproportionate in its funding practices they would be left with a choice between removing funds from men’s programs or increasing the overall level of funding.
First off, I’d like to see some hard data that shows how many scholarships are being lost and programs being dropped because of Title IX. I’m sure it’s happening to some extent, but if we’re going to do any sort of rational analysis, we have to have an idea how great the costs are.
Second, what’s the alternative to Title IX? No matter what problems it may have caused, it has clearly resulted in much more equality of opportunity when it comes to scholarships for men and women athletes. Would you prefer to go back to the days when there were ten male athletic scholarships for every one female athletic scholarship?
Title IX by no means requires schools to cut back on scholarships for male athletes. It does, however, require schools to equalize (proportionately) the number of scholarships available to male and female athletes. If Southcentral State U. previously offered 100 men’s scholarships and only 10 women’s scholarships, SSU can spend the money to add an extra 90 women’s scholarships, eliminate all of them, meet smack dab in the middle at 55 scholarships each, or any combination of the above. Sounds pretty equitable to me.
Incidentally, the “only football and basketball make money” argument strikes me as being a bit of a red herring, although I can’t quite put my finger on why . . .
I agree with the OP in that in operation Title IX has had the unintended negative effect of having colleges elect to eliminate non-revenue producing men’s sports, such as gymnastics and wrestling, in favor of funding women’s sports in order to comply with the statute. Sure, dropping such non-revenue producing men’s sports isn’t mandated by Title IX, but doing so is certainly the easiest and least costly solution.
Ideally, I’d say cut them all. From my ivory tower, I say that colleges ought not be in the business of funding semi-professional sports teams, nor should they be in the business of running teams that only the participants and their immediate families care about, such as swimming, gymnastics or field hockey. As my solution won’t be adopted anytime soon -or anytime later either - I’d say the solution is to have exempt revenue producing sports from Title IX. Football and men’s basketball, and at some schools women’s hoops, generate the most revenue for school sports programs so it seems fair to me that they be exempted from Title IX. A school can promote its women’s field hockey team all it wants, but its not likely to get 80,000 people to pay $30 each to come see them play.
I don’t disagree that Title IX has done good work. I simply think that it is not the best alternative. There are clearly problems when men’s programs have to be cut. Also, we are talking about NCAA not IOC or WNBA. What you heard on the radio about WNBA has nothing to do with this.
What possible sport do women have that compares with football?
Also, I did not misrepresent the solutions, you didn’t read it right. I said “same ratio of male to female athletic scholarships, as there are male to female students”.
Something in Title IX does require schools to drop men’s sports, indirectly. If there are 10 mens and 6 womens and no women sports to add, they must drop 4 mens.
I am not sure exactly how many, but I can give specific examples.
“The National Organization for Women, for example, has filed a complaint against UCLA and Southern California alleging Title IX noncompliance – ignoring that UCLA, to try to satisfy gender quotas, disbanded a men’s swimming team that produced 20-plus Olympic gold medals and eliminated a nationally ranked men’s gymnastics team.”
“The NCAA found gender quotas are denying more than 20,000 men a chance to compete in college athletics, compared to 1992 rates – yet fewer than 6,000 female athletes were added during that time. And the quotas hurt the finances of athletic departments, where men’s teams typically bring in the money. At Southern California, for example, men’s teams brought in $18.4 million last year; women’s teams generated $39,000.”
from
Title IX’s dark side: Sports gender quotas
By Curt A. Levey
Originally printed in USA Today, July 12, 1999
Actually, this sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Substituting women’s soccer and water polo for men’s swimming and gymnastics doesn’t sound like such a big deal. None of these four sports are anywhere near the moneymakers that men’s football is, so the point seems kind of moot to me.
I applaud anything that gets girls into high school and college sports in the role of something besides pom-pom girls. It wasn’t happening by itself, that’s for sure.
I think you mean “heiffers.” Unless you misspelled “huffers,” and the host was accusing WNBA players of sniffing glue.
Being compared to a large, ungainly animal would hardly raise an eyebrow if it was directed at a male football player. John Madden himself has called football linemen “clidesdales” on at least one occasion. Why is such a comparison considered so much more grievous of an insult when directed at a female athlete? It’s not like WBNA players like to think of themselves as petite and helpless.
I was using the remark as an indication that women athletes still do not receive the acceptance and respect which is accorded to their male counterparts. It is simply an indication that the social inequities which Title IX was designed to mitigate still exist.
From a standpoint of entertainment and athleticism, most women’s sports are a bad joke. The WNBA is a farce, and NCAA women’s basketball is far worse.
But, alas, none of that matters. The essential philosophy behind Title IX was correct. In THEORY, at least, athletics are SUPPOSED to be an extracurricular activity provided for the benefit and enjoyment of students. If a school CLAIMS to accept that theory (and they all do), there’s no excuse for failing to provide both genders equal access to such extracurricular activities.
Moreover, it simply isn’t true that men’s football programs are (uniformly) money makers for their schools. Sure, at some of the big football powerhouses like Michigan and Notre Dame, football reaps in big bucks. But I suspect that playing Division I level football is a net money LOSER for a lot of schools. Many colleges keep Division I football teams out of a misguided notion that they can’t be a “big time” university without football.
In reality, many colleges would do well to abolish football, or to scale it way back. If they did, most would NEVER have another Title IX problem, and they could afford to set up decent facilities for intramural sports and smaller-scale sports (tennis, swimming, racquetball, whatever) that ordinary students could actually enjoy.
I agree with the OP in that I think Title IX has had some unintended consequences. However, I disagree that those consequences are due to the law itself.
Title IX does not require that there be strict agreement between the percentage of women enrolled and the percentage of women atheletes. That is merely one way a school can demonstrate compliance. However, according to the U.S. Office of Civil Rights, quoted in this article:
The problem is, very few schools bother doing such surveys, and even worse, the courts tend to focus on the very easily examined and enforced quotas. From the same article:
So, the problem is not that the law was poorly written, or even that it did not forsee this very situation. The problem is that both the schools and the courts have focused on the numbers.
In the end, it comes down to money. Title IX imposes the requirement on schools that they meet the athletic desires of women to the same extent they do for men. If a school has to add women’s programs to meet this goal, and they don’t have the money to do so without sacrificing some men’s programs, then what choice do they have? It certainly is not fair, Title IX notwithstanding, to deny women athletic opportunity simply because the men’s team was established first.
gEEK
I think you mean “Cyldesdales” unless you misspelled “glidesdales,” and Madden was accusing football linemen of floating above valleys in unpowered aircraft. (Uh, okay, it’s a stretch . . .)
I’m interested in what you mean by this, as it’s a common argument used by those who denigrate women’s sports (yes, I realize your argument is supporting the theory behind Title IX).
A bad joke compared to what? The level of athleticism and entertainment in men’s sports? Does this surprise you? Men’s sports have a long tradition in this country of training players for a lifetime. A kid could start out in midget football and end up going to the pros. They would be cultivated every step of the way, provided with financial and emotional incentives so that they didn’t have to worry about other things, like paying for college or getting a “real job.” There has never been an analogue in women’s sports. So of course the players aren’t as good.
And, until very recently, women couldn’t make a living playing sports in any kind of a large-scale environment. And so young players with high potential had to look elsewhere for a paycheck.
On the contrary, I think women’s pro and college-level sports have come a very long way in a short period of time. Tell you what: We’ll start the clock when there are 85 full ride women’s scholarships available, and then give it thirty years. Then we’ll examine the level of athleticism and entertainment the pro teams fed by those college athletes provide, m’kay?
BTW, tracer, I think you mean heifer. Unless…oh, never mind.
Excellent. Then in teh future we should never again have to hear about a men’s sports team being cut to make room for a women’s sports team.
What’s that? The number by itself is actually meaningless to the application of Title IX, since it does not address the balance of resources at individal schools which is how Title IX is applied? Oh. Never mind.
Jesus Christ, you’re one to talk about bringing up meaningless information. What were some of you’re ealier gems in this thread?
“I think that most posters to this board were still alive when the IOC was refusing to sanction a woman’s marathon because it was considered too strenuous.” and “I think that just last week I heard a nationally syndicated sports radio host referring to WNBA players as “heffers”.”
I fail to see how those statements are more relavent to a discussion of how title IX is applied in college sports than my actually bringing up ncaa stats on college athletic programs.
Yes, among the comments I made were two that addressed the social perception of female athletes. It seemed pertinent to examine that question since you asked whether Title IX had run its course. You do recall that it is called Title IX because it is one part of a law designed to address teh social ill of sex descrimination in eductaion, right? So, do you think maybe it might be important to consider what the present social situation is if we are to decide whether the law has run its course?
I called your statistic meaningless because it shows more women’s teams than men’s teams at a time when you are stating that men’s teams are being disbanded specifically to create room for more women’s teams. Now, if you are telling the truth in both cases (and I am certain you are) then the overall statistical picture you present is obviously not pertinent to the analysis being used by colleges to reach Title IX compliance.
