Honoring women in our history
Women’s History Month, celebrated each March since 1987, is attracting more and more interest, especially as the nation marks the anniversaries of some key milestones in pursuit of fairness and equal treatment.
Two years ago it was the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The observance of that advancement and the incredibly difficult effort to bring it to fruition served to remind Americans of the value of rights they too often take for granted.
Right now for the first time a Black woman is being considered for a seat on the Supreme Court. If Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is confirmed, there would be four women on the bench at the high court. Such a notion would have been inconceivable decades ago.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the legislation known as Title IX, which requires educational institutions receiving federal funding to operate in a manner free of discrimination based on sex. The law addresses a wide-range of issues involving discrimination, including how charges of sexual harassment and assault are addressed. All of these are important, but the area that has attracted the most attention over the years is athletics.
Thanks to Title IX, opportunities for women and girls to play competitive sports have exploded. In 1972, when the law passed, 2% of college athletic budgets went to women’s sports. Around 15% of college women participated in sports. And colleges offered 2.5 women’s teams on average. The NCAA wasn’t even involved with women’s athletics.
It took time, but those numbers grew dramatically as schools increased women’s sports offerings. While fewer than 30,000 college women participated in sports in 1981, over 200,000 did in 2017. By 2004, colleges offered an average of more than eight different women’s sports teams. During 2006-2016, the number of female athletes at the college level grew 25%.
A similar phenomenon took place in high schools, where sports participation by girls grew 990% from 1971 to 2003.
The number of female Olympians also has grown enormously. In the 2021 summer Olympics, women outnumbered men 329 to 284 on the U.S. team, compared with 90 women to 338 men in the 1972 Olympics.
Even so, disparities still exist between men’s and women’s sports.
A U.S. Department of Education report from
2019 found that 87% of NCAA schools “offered disproportionately higher rates of athletic opportunities to male athletes compared to their enrollment.”
Pepperdine University’s student-run news organization reported that female students make up 53% of the student body at Division I colleges, yet athletic departments devote only 36% of their budgets to women’s sports. That adds up to an extra $133 million each year for men’s sports compared with women’s sports at the Division I level alone.
A year ago the issue came to a head when women’s basketball players noted the minimal amenities for their teams in the NCAA tournament compared with the deluxe accommodations offered for men. The controversy that resulted led to improvements, but there is always room for more.
That’s the general message that reverberates in many aspects of observing Women’s History Month. We’ve gone far in leveling the playing field, but much more can be done.
This observance has its roots in a 1978 Women’s History Day in Sonoma County, Calif. It quickly grew into a national observance for a week, and then a month, built around the March 8 International Women’s Day. Each year a presidential proclamation is issued to honor the extraordinary achievements of American women.
We encourage readers to learn more by visiting womenshistorymonth.gov/. It offers an online research guide telling the stories of women through a wide variety of perspectives.
We conclude by echoing the words of President Jimmy Carter in announcing National Women’s History Week in 1980:
“From the first settlers who came to our shores, from the first American Indian families who befriended them, men and women have worked together to build this nation. Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed. But the achievements, leadership, courage, strength and love of the women who built America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well.”
We encourage readers to learn more by visiting womenshistorymonth.gov/. It offers an online research guide telling the stories of women through a wide variety of perspectives.