WHAT IS TITLE IX?

It is the year 1950, a new school year is about to begin, and preseason fall sports are on the come up. Imagine you are a freshman, eager, anxious, and intimidated, and you cannot wait to try out for a high school sports team. Now raise your hand if you would plan to play a sport- one you have already played or one that is new to you. Now, if you are a woman, put your hand down. Now, take a moment to look around and see how many hands are still in the air. This is an exaggerated model as there were different situations and circumstances at different schools, but the point of this exercise is to clearly display the discrimination in sports before legislation like Title IX. 

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    What is Title IX you may ask? Well, the answer to that question is simple, just take a look at the legislation. Title IX was passed on June 23, 1972, by President Richard Nixon. Title IX states in its preamble that, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any educational programs or activity receiving federal financial assistance” (“Title IX, Educational”). This legislation was one of the first times the issue of gender inequality in sports and education had been addressed. Until this point, classic female stereotypes were the driving force of the lack of opportunities. Many people in the United States had tunnel vision and were blind to the fact that women may be interested in sport and not just things such as sewing, cooking, and cleaning. Through Title IX women were finally granted the opportunities they had longed for and they were guaranteed to not lose them. The rules behind Title IX were clear, concise, and strict and they were monitored by the OCR (Office for Civil Rights) and enforced as much as possible to ensure effectiveness.

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 In order to be in line with the laws, institutions had to conform to the three-prong test and satisfy at least one of the three. The first prong can be satisfied by ensuring that the number of girls participating in sport is within five percent of the rate of girls enrolled. The second prong is satisfied by proving that the school has plans to expand girls’ athletic programs or that they have in the past made that same effort. The third and final prong is fairly simple. To meet the requirements of this prong the school must show that it is supporting girls’ interest in sport and that it is offering opportunities in new sports if there is enough interest for a team (Holdsworth). For example, if the school does not have a field hockey team but 20 girls are interested in field hockey then they should be given the opportunity to start a team. Title IX also ensured that women's sports not only had to be more widely offered but also they had to have the same amount of access to equipment and facilities that men had. This is something that is often still a struggle. 

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As with any piece of legislation, there were some immediate and long-term effects of Title IX. Title IX did drastically change the amount of female participation in sports and it resolved a lot of discrepancies in certain areas even though it did not fix the issue entirely. In her article, Andrea Kwon discusses some statistics taken after a period of 30 years, “Since the passage of Title IX, the number of girls participating in athletics has risen dramatically. Fewer than 300,000 girls participated in high school sports in 1971, compared to more than 3.6 million boys; by 2001, the number for girls had reached over 2.7 million, compared to more than 3.9 million boys”.  This improvement of  2.4 million more girls participating in sport, highlights the success of Title IX and how it really did impact our sports society.

However, there is another side to this argument and many valid points are made there.

With any piece of legislation, there are always going to be people that object. While many agreed with the passage of Title IX legislation, there were some people who disagreed and who believed that it was just a vehicle to suppress male sports and stunt the male sports phenomenon. In particular, the three-prong is infamous within the anti-Title IX group- people that believed the law was oppressive. This was an issue also discussed by Andrea Kwon in her article, “‘In particular, the three-part test for assessing Title IX compliance has generated intense disagreement about the intent and purpose of Title IX. Opponents of the test argue that it creates proportionality ‘quotas’ which discriminate against males, leaving schools little choice other than to eliminate, or to reduce budgets for, male sports programs.’”The purpose of this legislation should be to make the playing field for women and men in sport equal and not take opportunities away from either side, but that can be difficult without compliance, and a potential lack of interest. If females in a certain county or school are simply not interested in sport this can make it difficult to conform to some of the rules of the law and would therefore affect male sports with interest. As a result of this creating competitive teams also becomes hard, Janet Holdsworth states: “A major concern for many athletic departments at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to commit to gender equity while building powerful and competitive programs, managing shrinking athletic department budgets, and avoiding the decision to eliminate men's teams.” It is not that opposers do not want gender equality, it is that they want to ensure that it really is equality and not just a shift of oppression from one gender to the other. 

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 Though they were straightforward, the rules of this law were often hard to enforce as they were not extremely universal. Throughout the country, there are many different demographics and it is hard to create the law to apply to all of them. But Title IX did drive discussions about gender equality in sports and made it an important thought in the heads of many. Inequality in sports is still an extremely present issue and remains to be solved but if we made strides as Nixon did in 1972 we may have a chance at solving this issue. Just like when a baby learns to walk, it must learn to crawl first, before gender inequality can be solved it must be addressed somehow to gain attention, everything has to start somewhere.