Actually, the article doesn’t say that.
What it says is that Title IX considered softball “equivelent” to baseball, and therefore allowed universities to offer make one or both of them gender-exclusive.
Title IX did nothing to steer women to softball rather than baseball. What it did was say that offering baseball only to men was acceptable as long as women could play softball. Universities could still offer either or both to both genders, and the fact that they didn’t do that (when they didn’t do that) is entirely on them.
I think you’re drawing a meaningless distinction. Title IX defined an equivalence which caused colleges to segregate. Sure, some colleges could have swam upstream on that but why would they?
Your argument is like saying that it’s not the tax code’s fault that billionaires can get by paying no taxes, they are the ones that choose to file and exploit the loop holes and write offs.
No, I thought SpyOne’s comment was relevant. IIUC, Title IX explains why females can play softball instead of baseball, but not why they do, which is this thread’s question.
No, Title IX allowed schools to segregate.
Title IX did nothing to incentivize the segregation.
And I don’t really see any financial incentive to the segregation: who cares if you are spending $X on women’s softball or women’s baseball, either way you are spending $X. Title IX required you to spend $X, it just gave you the option of choosing one game or the other.
So it is a bit like if all those billionaires used blue ink to fill out their tax forms, and saying that was caused by the tax code allowing the forms to be filled in blue or black ink. No, the tax code permitted them to make that choice, but it did nothing to encourage it, and if the ALL chose one and not the other, that indicates that something was encouraging that choice.
At a guess, I’d blame an existing social belief that softball was better suited than baseball to girls. That would incentivize making softball for girls instead of baseball, which Title IX then allowed.
Yes, Title IX let universities designate softball for women and baseball for men.
From the article:
The incentive for universities was that the structure was already in place. Why trouble yourself with adding women’s baseball if you don’t have to? It sure sounds like women’s baseball advocates thought Title IX could have and should have done more for their sport.
That has never been the understanding. Courts and the administrations have recognized that what is required by the law is that everyone gets an equivalent opportunity to participate in sports, not that they have to be exactly equal.
Makes sense. So if a woman wants to play baseball, that’s okay, but not at school. Only softball since it’s equivalent.
So is cheerleading the equivalent to football?
Or that’s not what you mean?
Just having an opportunity to participate in any selected sports. Just so happens that softball is similar to baseball.
Women’s and men’s tennis, basketball, cross country, swimming, etc. I suppose these are all okay for both women and men to do separately. But not baseball or football for body type reasons? Or just no demand? Or both? Tradition? Too masculine?
I don’t think body composition or the elbow thing are good explanations. The NPR article linked above pretty much laid it out. Women’s baseball used to be kind of popular. Then after WWII men’s baseball was televised and its popularity blew away the women’s leagues. Women were then directed to softball as the more feminine sport.
There is no NCAA men’s softball because baseball is deemed the equivalent.
There are men’s softball leagues, though. Both fast pitch and slow pitch.
So it’s the schools fault for not offering baseball for women and the reason why they probably don’t is because… the women aren’t interested enough in playing baseball so they don’t bother to offer it?
Clearly most women just don’t want to play baseball. Why not?
If they were to offer women’s baseball-- when they go to play competitively against other schools, those schools, too, would have to have a womens baseball team… so every school would essentially have to be on board with having a female baseball team which again, would require women to want to be on the baseball team…
So the only way to do this is to eliminate softball as an option. But people already like softball. Men and women both.
So softball stays. Baseball stays. No women on baseball teams at school or men on softball teams because we don’t do co-ed. Baseball is for men, softball for women, and everything is kosher.
Well, yes and no. Back in the 70’s that’s just the way it was. Softball had been deemed the feminine sport. Women don’t want to play baseball now because it’s not, and never really was, a real option. I couldn’t even guess what the interest level would be if NCAA mandated women’s baseball. Would it become more popular than softball?
Could it have something to do with how many innings a woman can pitch before her arm starts to give out? At pretty much every level of baseball, each team has a group of pitchers, and at levels below college, there are specified limits as to how much someone can pitch (for example, in California high schools, the limit is 10 innings per week). However, in softball, most good teams use the same starting pitcher pretty much every game, and the “limit” seems to be, “Pitch until your arm falls off - then pitch with your other arm if you can.”
My suspicion is that brovalone has the gist of it: women play softball instead of baseball because that’s the way it has been for decades. In other words: tradition and inertia. So, even if women want to play baseball, they (a) may not have the opportunities to do so (unless they play on a male team), and (b) likely do have the opportunities to play a similar sport in softball.
Let’s say that colleges wanted to start fielding women’s baseball teams. Presumably, they would primarily draw from athletes who had played softball in high school, but you’re asking them to learn a different (though undoubtedly similar) sport. But, what you’d really want is to be getting college athletes who were already skilled at baseball…and that’d mean getting high schools (and girls’ youth programs) to switch from softball to baseball. All of that means a big change in girls’ / women’s athletics, at multiple levels, when there’s no single entity that could institute such a change.
I suppose it’s not unlike the idea of the NCAA deciding to make, say, Australian Rules football an intercollegiate sport (I was going to give rugby as an example, but there are, in fact, a fair number of colleges with rugby teams). The question is: where do your athletes come from, if they aren’t already playing the sport in high school or grade school?