Playing fair

Title IX leveled the field for women's collegiate sports. Have men's teams had to pay the price?

by Katharine Dunn

Like many female athletes, fencer Regina Lennox thinks she owes something to Title IX, but she also believes college sports owes something to women. Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funding, eased access to competitive sports for hordes of girls and women like her. Women's fencing is relatively young in this country, and Lennox, a senior at Boston College, competes in a weapons class that has been open to women for less than a decade. Although she had never fenced before she tried out as a freshman, she's done well and she loves it. "I am very grateful to Title IX for mandating equal opportunities," she says. "It is justice."

AN EVEN PLAYING FIELD? Since the inception of Title IX, female college students have gotten athletic opportunities their forerunners never imagined. But critics of the law say that the price paid is the cutting of men's sports teams -- football at Boston University, for examle.

Many people are equally appreciative: according to a phone survey conducted by ESPN and the Sports Authority, an athletic-gear chain store, the 1972 adoption of Title IX was the single most significant moment in women's sports history. "We're a better society because of Title IX," says Kimberly Schuld, manager of the gender equity and Title IX project for the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Virginia.

But that's about the extent of Schuld's charity toward the law. The IWF is a women's organization that opposes Title IX as it is now enforced. In Schuld's view, "justice" should have nothing to do with why women have more opportunities in sports. Ability should. She's not alone, though the IWF is the only women's group on this side of the issue. Male athletes and alumni who have seen their teams cut also argue that Title IX is being enforced in ways that were never intended.

In the past decade, college and university athletic departments across the country, including several in the Boston area, have cut or demoted men's varsity sports while adding women's teams. When this happens Title IX is often blamed, and almost always mentioned. Title IX guidelines do not require schools to remove men's teams; in fact, they recommend other solutions when a school is violating the rules. But the IWF and other groups argue that the elimination of men's teams is precisely how the law is being enforced. Title IX, they say, has become a policy of quotas -- and this violates the good intentions of the original law, discriminates against men, and fails to account for the "natural" differences between men's and women's interests and abilities. The upshot: they want the law changed. And with a Republican administration, Title IX reformers believe they'll find a sympathetic ear.

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When title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was signed into law by Richard Nixon, it wasn't specifically intended to redress discrimination against women in sports. In fact, Title IX didn't originally mention athletics at all. The law read, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Boys, girls, men, women, employees, and employers in most colleges, universities, and school districts are covered by the law, which grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and affirmative-action policies of the 1960s. Athletics was just one of many programs covered by the law, from admissions to financial aid. There was some initial grumbling that Title IX would require educational institutions to allow women to play football (the sacred cow of men's college sports), but since the bill did not specifically mention athletics, these fears were assuaged.

By the late '70s, however, the original statute was amended to include specific regulations regarding athletics. Affirmative-action measures were put in place, not only to ensure nondiscrimination for women interested in playing sports, but to mandate equivalent treatment for men's and women's teams. There was a lot at stake: college sports are big money. Every year, schools court top athletes, spending huge sums of money on recruiting and scholarships. Teams that succeed sell more tickets; in turn, alumni and the community reward them with financial support. About 85 percent of media references to a university mention its athletic teams, according to the Women's Sports Foundation, a group that promotes gender equity in athletics. It's a daunting task to reshape anything as steeped in tradition as college sports.

But it has paid off for women. Before Title IX, it was extremely rare for women to receive athletic scholarships to college; even two years after the law passed, fewer than 50 women did, compared to about 50,000 men. In 1997-'98, however, female students received about 40 percent of all college scholarship dollars, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 1971, one in 27 girls in high school participated in athletics; by 1998, the figure was one in three. Between 1999 and 2000, the number of women's teams per National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) school reached an all-time high. Meanwhile, a culture that had long thought of women as less athletic than men has grown more accustomed to female athletes. It would be impossible today to imagine police officers arresting a woman for revealing her bare legs as she took a dip in Boston Harbor, as they did in the 1940s, or officials trying to remove a woman from the Boston Marathon, as they did (unsuccessfully) in 1967.

Such progress can benefit women long after college. Harvard public-health researchers confirmed this year what they had suspected for a decade and a half -- women who exercise consistently during college face a significantly lower risk of developing breast cancer than their sedentary peers. Girls and women who play sports are also arguably more confident, have lower levels of depression, and learn the valuable skill of teamwork.

But as much good as Title IX has done, complying with it can be complicated for colleges. For the past 20 years, the law has been enforced by the Department of Education through the Office of Civil Rights (OCR). To determine whether a school is obeying the law, the OCR examines three areas: athletic benefits and opportunities, financial assistance, and student interests and abilities. Athletic benefits and opportunities include such things as equipment, game and practice times, and publicity. For these "laundry list" items, the OCR doesn't mandate equality of benefits, but rather equivalency. This means, for example, that men's and women's teams need not be publicized in exactly the same way, but the differences must be negligible. Complying with this aspect of Title IX is not particularly difficult, since there are no exact standards to uphold. Says Lynn Holleran, associate athletic director and senior women's administrator at Boston College, "We don't pay attention to counting press releases."

It's the other aspects of Title IX -- financial assistance and student interests and abilities -- that concern most athletic directors. That's mostly because, they say, these statistical aspects are the easiest for the OCR to measure, and therefore the most important for schools to meet. "[Laundry-list compliance] is much more difficult to determine," says Holleran. "Participation and finances are numbers, so it's a numbers game."

Essentially, it's easier to compare men's and women's scholarship dollars than their game and practice schedules. According to the OCR, Title IX rules state that the total amount of scholarship money awarded to men and women must be "substantially proportionate" to their participation rates in athletic programs. If the ratio of men to women athletes is 50/50, then scholarship dollars must be allocated accordingly. Several schools in Boston have been caught with less-than-equivalent scholarship rates. In 1997, the National Women's Law Center filed complaints with the OCR against 25 schools nationwide, charging that their scholarship dollars were distributed disproportionately. Boston University, Boston College, and Northeastern University were all named. All three have since increased women's scholarships.

But it's the "student interests and abilities" aspect of Title IX athletics policy that inspires the most controversy. In theory, if an athletic department is lopsided in favor of men's teams, it can remedy the situation in any one of three ways. But in practice, many people believe there are no real differences between the options -- that despite the so-called three-prong test, Title IX compliance results in only one thing: quotas.

Under the three-prong test, the first option is to make men's and women's participation rates in athletics "substantially proportionate" to undergraduate enrollment rates, just as scholarship money is supposed to be "substantially proportionate" to the participation rates themselves. This generally requires adding women's teams. In the alternatives, the department can either prove that it has in the past been responsive to women's interests by expanding their athletic opportunities (prong two), or prove that it already accommodates the "interests and abilities" of women on campus, and therefore doesn't need to add women's teams or players (prong three).

Here's the problem: in practice, there's no standard way to measure whether a school is complying with the demands of prongs two and three, although the OCR makes recommendations. As a result, everyone ends up trying to meet the first test. And the only way to do this is to add women's teams or players, which can force cutbacks in men's programs. "The ideal of compliance was that schools could just add women's sports [if their athletic departments were inequitable]," says Gary Strickler, athletic director at Boston University. In the 1980s, many schools had little difficulty doing that. Now, says Strickler, "unfortunately, it's not as easy." Even if athletic-department budgets stay the same (and many directors claim their resources are shrinking), more women than ever before are enrolling in universities. Strickler points out that the percentage of women in the general university population grows every year, and the BU athletic department must shift accordingly; it's a "moving target," he says. When schools are financially stretched and opt to cut teams, more often than not, they're men's. "In my observation, in the Division I world, [Title IX enforcement] has largely been at the expense of men's opportunities," says Bill Gehling, athletic director at Tufts University, which competes at the non-scholarship Division III level. "They're in a difficult position. In Division I, the cost of running programs is significantly higher than at our level. It tends to be men's sports that are weaker in terms of lobbying strength. It really is a shame."

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