At The Guardian last week, I had a story on Title IX’s history and impact. It also delves into the issues the law — in this case, strictly the sports aspect of what was intended to be about education — will face in the future.
I’d also recommend some excellent work at USA TODAY, starting with this timeline that is focused on but not limited to sports:
Other parts of their anniversary investigations are behind a paywall, though if you’re an Apple News subscriber, you can find the stories there:
It’s great to see my old paper revving up its investigative and analytical work. Almost makes me wish I was still there. Almost.
But enough about me and my career decisions. Let’s talk about how Title IX should be better.
For starters, we’re focusing on the wrong thing. Specifically, the gap between roster spots available for men and roster spots available to women. From one of the USA TODAY stories:
None was larger than the University of North Carolina, though. It would need to add 395 female roster spots, the analysis found.
I’m not predisposed to praise UNC’s sports program. I went to its arch-rival.
But … seriously?
The numbers are correct, I’m sure. But they show how Title IX watchdoggery is really missing the boat.
In the 2021–22 academic year, North Carolina’s women went unbeaten in lacrosse to claim their third national championship. The tennis team reached the NCAA semis after losing a streak of ACC titles going back 2015. The nine-time champion field hockey team fell short of the Final Four for the first time since 2008. The basketball team went 25–7 to return to its usual spot in the Sweet 16. The soccer team lost in the first round and will have to content itself with its 22 national championships (1 AIAW before the NCAA took over). The volleyball team made the NCAA tournament, and the cross-country and swim/dive teams finished in the top 20.
Does this seem like a university that doesn’t emphasize women’s sports?
And like a lot of colleges, North Carolina has several women-only sports: field hockey, gymnastics, rowing, softball and volleyball. Three sports are men-only: baseball, football and wrestling.
So why isn’t North Carolina in compliance?
Because the undergraduate student body in Chapel Hill is 60% women.
The primary intent of Title IX (educational opportunity) has been overwhelmingly successful at UNC. That makes the secondary intent (athletic opportunity) much harder to fulfill.
And that’s typical. A school with 60% women is increasingly the norm these days.
Proportionality is just one of the three “prongs” in Title IX compliance, but it’s the one advocates and journalists are stressing these days. For one thing, it’s easier to quantify than “does the university have a history of expanding its programs for” or “is the university fully accommodating the interests and abilities of” the underrepresented sex.
The latter is archaic. The vast majority of student-athletes enrolled in their college of choice with the intent of playing that sport. Polling students who either chose not to play a sport in college or weren’t good enough to be recruited is nonsensical.
The “history of expanding” its programs quickly hits the problem of having no more reasonable programs to offer. A lot of colleges have added equestrian, a tiny sport whose competitors generally don’t need scholarships to go to college, just to make up the numbers.
For reference of the number of teams in each sport, start with the 2020–21 snapshot from the latest NCAA participation report:
Field hockey and beach volleyball are for women only. Bowling has only three men’s teams. Women’s teams account for more than 80% of the teams in volleyball, equestrian, gymnastics and rugby, and more than 70% in rowing. (There are 940 men’s baseball teams, though that’s offset by 983 women’s softball teams.)
Would a national survey of students’ interests show us a pent-up demand for 50-woman rowing teams? Or bowling or equestrian? And would it show that men have no interest in gymnastics, rowing or volleyball?
But if you’re a “men’s rights” advocate, it’s time to go back to your cave. Women account for just 10.6% of wrestling teams, and that’s after a surge from 4 to 30 women’s teams since 2019. The NCAA’s overall participant count is still 56% men. The NCAA disburses massive prizes for men’s basketball and nothing for women’s basketball.
And there’s an elephant in the room, represented neatly by Alabama’s mascot. That would be 657 football teams.
Ah, football. The benefactor of all other sports, right?
Well, sometimes. At the very biggest athletics departments. Maybe. See the Knight Commission’s work in conjunction with Syracuse, or see Sportico’s database of big schools.
Mark Ziegler, one of the clearest-eyed columnists on such matters in the country, puts it more bluntly:
The next thing to understand is that women’s sports, with few exceptions, lose money at the intercollegiate level. Lots and lots of it.
Only about 25 of 1,100-odd NCAA athletic departments actually turn a profit, all of them in power conferences with huge TV contracts. Seventy percent of San Diego State’s athletic budget is subsidized by state tax dollars, student fees or booster donations.
And Ziegler’s piece points to a bleak future, in which football teams split off entirely from the university. Sure, lawyers would fight about it for years, but it could be a serious threat.
So what can we do? It’s not my place to rewrite the law, and not just because I’m a middle-aged man. But I have some suggestions …
Take a holistic view …: For some sports, going school-by-school misses the point. Why not go sport-by-sport? Does each sport have enough colleges offering it? Does an accomplished athlete in a given sport have enough places to play?
… especially with Olympic sports: The NCAA participation stats from yesteryear show the occasional archery or badminton team. Why not find a few schools that are capable of hosting such programs? A partnership with the USOPC could lead to small but successful programs that give students more opportunities while also boosting the U.S. teams. And in this holistic view, give exemptions so that a men’s team can exist where a women’s team exists — don’t just have schools add women’s badminton or women’s modern pentathlon for gender numbers. Maybe we can even have some men’s field hockey teams.
For proportionality, go by a 50–50 split, not enrollment: Why punish a school for being so successful at enrolling women? Conversely, why let a school off the hook for being 60% male, still? Encouraging more women to attend a traditionally male engineering school is a win-win, isn’t it? And basing proportionality on enrollment, again, is based on the assumption that students go to a school and then peruse the athletics department’s offerings.
Force football to pay the bills: Football advocates have long argued that their sport pays for all the others. Again, not always. In fact, rarely. The main reason for that is the proliferation of football facilities and staffers. Instead of funding the women’s soccer coaches’ recruiting budget, that money goes to the assistant to the assistant tight ends quality control coach on the football team. Let’s say this — if football-playing schools want an exemption from Title IX’s proportionality prong, they can do so if football really is paying for other sports.
Make sports match the general public’s interest, even if sports aren’t varsity: Remember JVs? They still exist in high school. The only junior varsity I know of in college is North Carolina’s men’s basketball JV. (As much as I defended UNC earlier, adding a women’s JV seems reasonable.) How many more good soccer players are out there? Probably more than we have equestrian athletes or even rowers.
By current accounting, every difference in men’s and women’s numbers is a “lost opportunity” or “lost scholarship.” But what “opportunities” do we want? A spot on a JV soccer team is more attainable to a more diverse group than a spot on a team in equestrian or other sports (rowing, squash) that generally exist only in expensive private high schools. And in terms of “lost scholarships,” there are a lot more athletes who “lose” scholarships in basketball players (men’s and women’s) than in the prep-school sports.
We can make Title IX work. We have to. It’s going to be under attack in the coming decades from people with reasonable (the numbers don’t work) and unreasonable (the recently emboldened patriarchy).
It’s been successful so far. Continued success means continued vigilance and examination.
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