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A Times Editorial
The past 30 years have brought welcome new athletic opportunities for girls and young women, but some men's programs are unfairly crying foul.
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 8, 2002
Thirty years after Congress passed Title IX, the face of sports has changed. On the professional level, the WNBA (basketball) and WUSA (soccer) have joined tennis and golf and other established women's sports. In college, the number of women competing in varsity sports has grown five-fold. In high school, roughly 2.8-million girls played sports last year -- almost 10 times the number in 1972.
By most measures, Title IX, which was an amendment to the Education Act that banned discrimination on the basis of sex, has been an inspiring success. But that hasn't stopped some men's sports programs from crying foul.
In February, a coalition of men's sports groups, including the National Wrestling Coaches Association, filed a suit claiming that Title IX has gone too far and now discriminates against men in its attempt to bring equity for women. The argument -- that men's collegiate sports teams should not be disbanded to achieve numerical equality with women's sports teams -- is valid. But it doesn't appear to apply to the current facts.
First, courts have consistently said that a university can comply with Title IX in one of three ways: by roughly matching the percentage of sports participants per gender to the percentage of general school enrollment; by demonstrating a history of expanding sports opportunities for women; or by generally meeting the athletic needs of its female students. In other words, Title IX is not simply a quota, and a recent U.S. General Accounting Office study confirmed as much by reporting that, of 74 universities that were deemed in compliance from 1994 to 1998, only 21 used the percentage standard as evidence.
More to the point, men's sports have continued to grow. Since 1972, the number of men playing collegiate sports has increased from 169,800 to 208,866. In the past two decades of NCAA competition, for example, the number of men's baseball teams has jumped from 642 to 857 and basketball teams from 741 to 989. There have also been increases for track, football, golf, tennis and soccer.
What is happening to collegiate men's wrestling is of concern, but not necessarily a product of Title IX. As the National Women's Law Center points out, 53 universities dropped their wrestling teams from 1984 to 1988, a period in which Title IX was not enforced for intercollegiate athletics.
"Schools dropping men's programs and blaming Title IX are the worst examples," Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation in East Meadow, N.J., told a reporter. "That's not the way to correct any discriminatory situation. You don't bring the previously advantaged gender down to the level of the disadvantaged."
The Bush Justice Department has ducked the wrestlers' lawsuit, arguing that it should be dismissed only on procedural grounds because it was filed against the U.S. Department of Education and not against the universities involved. At some point, though, the Justice Department will have to take a stand, and it should avoid being drawn into the legal notion that Title IX is a zero-sum game.
In the field of athletics, Title IX can produce two winners. Boys and young men have always enjoyed the fruits of competition -- from the professional opportunities to the college scholarships to the lessons of pride and discipline they derived as children. Now girls and young women are getting to play ball, too, and, leaving aside the allure of professional sports, they will be better people because of it.
Competition often teaches the lessons of teamwork, and those lessons need not be lost in this arena. Title IX says only that the boys must share, not surrender, their field. What is unfair about that?