40 years later, importance of Title IX hasn’t waned
President Nixon had quite a week in midJune 1972. On June 17, burglars funded by his re-election committee broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. We know how that turned out. Six days later, Nixon signed Title IX, the law that finally opened the playing fields of America to girls and women, forever changing our nation by allowing the other half of our population to learn about winning, losing, teamwork and sportsmanship at a young age.
At least he had a positive footnote at the end of a very bad week.
Title IX turns 40 on Saturday, and its success has been staggering. It’s nothing complicated, just 37 words: “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.”
According to the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF), about 294,000 girls competed in high school sports the year before Title IX became law. Last year, the number was nearly 3.2 million, an increase of about 980%. At the college level, there weren’t even 30,000 women playing sports 40 years ago. Last year, there were nearly 200,000.
Things sound so good for this law at this milestone that the natural inclination would be to say Title IX has done its job, success has been achieved, every girl who wants to play a sport or two or three is playing and the law isn’t needed anymore, thank you very much.
But that’s not so. Boys statistically are given many more opportunities to play sports than girls. Men are now gobbling up the women’s team coaching jobs that women once aspired to. And in spite of the whining about Title IX that we still occasionally hear from guys who seemingly would prefer life in the 1950s, women have not yet come close to achieving the proportional representation Title IX mandates.
According to WSF figures, women make up 56% of college students, but only 43% of studentathletes.
If you know a female athlete, you’ve heard her tell the anecdotes of subtle discrimination: the high school that gave its female athletes smaller varsity letters than its male athletes. Another high school that built an athletic complex but forgot to put in a softball field. The battles between boys and girls over the practice fields and the gym and the better game times.
Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer and the WSF’s senior director of advocacy, told USA TODAY Sports in a telephone interview Tuesday that she gets at least 300 calls or e-mails a year, “from parents, coaches, girls and women, and each one is telling me a different story of discrimination against female athletes. This is 2012, and I’m still getting hundreds of these calls. For people to say we don’t need Title IX anymore, I completely disagree. We need Title IX more than ever.”
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan agrees. “We’ve made tremendous progress since the passage of Title IX,” he said in an e-mail to USA TODAY Sports on Tuesday. “My sister, the better basketball player in the family, has been a direct beneficiary, as have countless other women and girls. But 40 years since the law’s passage, it’s clear we have more work to do as a country. We need to provide more women with the opportunity to pursue cutting-edge fields of study like math and science. And women are still far too underrepresented in collegiate athletics. In this day and age, that’s unacceptable and we still need Title IX to help change that.”
In just a generation and a half, Title IX has altered the way we think as a sports culture, from how accepting we are of female athletes to how much we want our daughters to be involved in sports, starting with peewee soccer all the way to the dream of a college scholarship.
One can argue that Title IX is the most important law in our nation over the past 40 years. Others will disagree, but no one can deny just how significant it has been. Think of that girlathlete you see in the kitchen every morning. Whatever she is going to become — a mother, a lawyer, a doctor, a businesswoman, a coach, a teacher or some combination thereof — she will be better at it because she played sports.