Title IX: Fight for Gender Equality Continues

The second of Oakton Patch's two-part series on the state of girls sports as Title IX celebrates its 40th anniversary. .

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Melissa Shebat has played sports her entire life, bringing her talents to three of Oakton High School's varsity sports: field hockey, girls lacrosse and girls swim and dive.

Shebat, a two-time All-American swimmer and All-Concorde District second team field hockey player, is a rising senior and has already decided she will not pursue a scholarship for any of the sports she loves because she does not want to give any of them up for one.

On the 40th anniversary of Title IX, many will be applauding the simple fact Shebat had a choice to make at all. Before June 23, 1972, Shebat would not have had a viable path to college athletics. 

"I really thought about playing field hockey in college, but I just don't think I can dedicate myself that much to one sport. I'd rather play club and stick with all three, if I can," Shebat said. "I'm so glad I had the option, though, and glad I've played sports my whole life."

Then there is recent Oakton High graduate Caroline Coyer, and soccer player who helped lead the girls basketball team to its first state title this year. She and her twin sister Katherine earned a basketball scholarship to Villanova University. 

"When I look back on high school and my childhood, I can pretty much sum up all my experiences with sports," Coyer said. "I obviously was not just playing for a scholarship, but as I got older and things got tougher, it really tests your will to play well and play better. If I didn't have college basketball as an option or didn't play sports, I'd be a different person for sure."

Title IX Beyond Oakton

Female athletes at Oakton High School may have found their experiences largely equal to their male counterparts, but they may discover fellow female athletes had a vastly different high school experience.

In the past five years, the athletic participation gap between girls and boys at the high school level has grown to where female high school athletes receive 1.3 million fewer athletic participation opportunities than their male counterparts, according to the Women's Sports Foundation.

The participation gap continues at the collegiate level, with 63,000 fewer opportunities at NCAA Institutions and a money gap of $183 million less for women's sports, according to WSF. 

But many of these institutions are technically in compliance with Title IX because they meet prong three of Title IX's three-pronged test, which requires schools to accommodate female athletes based on interest.

"Basically what they do is say we don't need to offer as many opportunities for girls and women because not as many girls and women want to play," said Angela Hattery, a women's studies professor at George Mason University who has published two papers on Title IX. "If you look at how many hundreds of thousands of young girls play youth and high school sports, it's just simply impossible more girls don't want that opportunity."

In 2006, Hattery and Earl Smith, a professor of sociology and the director of American ethnic studies at Wake Forest University, published a paper on budgets for sports played by both men and women.

"What we found was that the 'revenue-generating' sports, though even that's a misnomer, like basketball, had greater disparities than sports less popular at the collegiate level, like soccer," Hattery said. "So it's interesting that in the sports where there are, in many ways, the biggest opportunities, there are the biggest differences based on gender."

They found the budget disparities lead to scholarships for less popular sports that amount to a fraction of the scholarship amounts for football and basketball, regardless of gender, despite already being given fewer total scholarships to comply with rules set by the NCAA. In the 2011-12 academic year, football teams in the FBS were able to offer 85 scholarships, while soccer may offer 9.9 for boys soccer and 14 for girls soccer.

In the May 23 article "The Silent Enemy of Men's Sports" in ESPN Magazine, Peter Keating writes of the blame the NCAA rulebook should take in the elimination of men's sports at the collegiate level, which is often attributed to Title IX.

"Colleges have indeed axed hundreds of men's teams in the Title IX era, often while explicitly scapegoating the law. ... But if you leave preconceptions aside and just look at the data, you will find that the real enemy of men's sports isn't Title IX. It's NCAA scholarship limits," Keating wrote.

Pointing the blame at Title IX for the elimination of men's sports — though total opportunities for male athletes has also grown in the Title IX era — is a "brilliant strategy" for distracting from the real funding issues in colleges, Hattery said.

"Who they really should be blaming is football because they're tying up those 85 scholarships, which I don't know how you can ever argue they need that many," said Hattery, who also noted WSF's statistic that 64 percent of Division I and Division II football programs lose money. "If some of those less popular men's sports in danger of being canceled could recognize their ally is actually women's sports, they could probably fight to keep the sport."

'Title IX Is Not Just About Sports'

On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972, which included a portion now simply referred to as Title IX. Though Title IX is most associated with sports, its intention was to bring gender equality to all educational institutions that receive federal funds:

"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."

The law has moved the U.S. toward gender equity by leaps and bounds, ensuring more educational opportunities for women in medicine, law and other fields historically closed off to women. 

"Title IX is not just about sports," Hattery said. "It applies to any educational institution that receives federal funding, but it's interesting sports has become the site of contestation. I think it's probably one of the areas where girls have been denied an awful lot of opportunities, so early on you began to see lawsuits and the NCAA finding ways to address it."

One of the latest applications of Title IX has been to fight against sexual harassment and sexual assault cases on college campuses.

In April 2011, the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Education Department issued a "Dear Colleague" letter to colleges that delineated Title IX requirements on preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault.

"If a young woman is raped on a college campus, not only might she be able to make a criminal charge, but the university might be charged with violating Title IX if they don't provide an equally safe environment for male and female students," Hattery said. 

Read Part I: