The Title IX activist who battled discrimination

In 1969, Bernice Sandler was working as a part-time lecturer at the University of Maryland when she asked a male colleague why her applications for a full-time position kept being rejected. “Let’s face it,” he told her. “You come on too strong for a woman.” Her first reaction was to go home and cry. Then Sandler decided to fight back, and began researching the legal strategies of civil rights activists. She finally found a weapon in a previously unheralded 1968 executive order that barred institutions with federal contracts from discriminating on the basis of sex. Most colleges, Sandler realized, received federal dollars. Armed with this knowledge, she launched a campaign that would result in the 1972 passage of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in education. By giving women equal access to admissions, financial aid, sports facilities, and more, she said, Title IX helped kick-start “a social revolution with an impact as large as the Industrial Revolution.”

Sandler was born in Brooklyn to parents who owned a women’s sportswear store, said The

New York Times. In school, she was annoyed that boys got to do the best jobs, “like be a cross- ing guard, fill the inkwells, or operate the slide projector.” She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology and a doctorate in education counseling, but after failing to secure a full-time job in those fields worked as a preschool teacher, guitar instructor, and secretary. At the time, Sandler didn’t consider herself a feminist. It was her husband who described her rejection notices as “sex discrimination,” sparking her interest in the field. “Working with the fledgling Women’s Equity Action League, she amassed evidence of discrimination” in virtually all aspects of higher education, said The Wall Street Journal. Sandler filed hundreds of complaints against colleges and was hired by Congress to research gender bias in academia. The passage of Title IX triggered “a sea change” in universities, said NPR.org. Schools could no longer provide swank facilities for male athletes and second-rate gear for women, and quotas that limited women’s access to programs in law and medicine were abolished. Yet Sandler, who never stopped campaigning against discrimination, understood that it would take generations to fully eliminate gender bias. “We have only taken the very first steps,” she said in 2007, “of what will be a very long journey.”