Myths
Myth: Title IX requires quotas against men.
Fact: Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in federally
funded education programs, which means female students must have equal
opportunities to participate in educational programs, including athletics.
Because Title IX
allows sports teams to be segregated by gender, schools themselves decide
how many participation opportunities they will give female, as compared
to male, students. Title IX does not in any way require quotas; it simply
requires that schools allocate participation opportunities nondiscriminatorily.
A school can meet this requirement if it can demonstrate any one of the following:
- that the percentages of male and female athletes are substantially proportionate to the percentages of male and female students enrolled; or
- that it has a history and continuing practice of expanding athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex; or
- that its athletics program fully and effectively accommodates the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex.
Myth: Courts and OCR only look at the numbers, which
means Title IX is a quota.
Fact: Prong one is not a quota; it simply measures whether a school is providing equal participation opportunities. In any event, schools have three separate ways to meet Title IX's participation requirements. This test is both lenient and flexible, allowing schools to comply with Title IX even if they do not satisfy prong one. And contrary to popular belief, schools do not always choose prong one. For example, between 1994 and 1998, of the 74 OCR cases involving Title IX's participation requirements, only 21 schools, or less than one- third, chose prong one as their means of compliance.
Myth: Bureaucrats at OCR have pushed Title IX beyond the language of the statute.
Fact: The federal courts have repeatedly upheld the
three-part test as
consistent with Title IX's language and goals. All eight federal courts
of appeals that have considered the issue have upheld the three-part test
and none have held that the test imposes quotas. Supreme Court refused
to hear Brown University's challenge to the three-part test, which was
based on the stereotype that women are less interested than men in playing
sports.
Myth: Title IX forces schools to cut men's sports.
Fact: Title IX in no way requires schools to cut men's sports. Some schools have decided on their own to eliminate certain men's sports, like gymnastics and wrestling, rather than controlling bloated football and basketball budgets, which consume a whopping 72% of the average Division I-A school's total men's athletic operating budget. For example, San Diego State University decided to address its $2 million budget deficit by cutting its men's volleyball team instead of cutting slightly into the $5 million football budget. But there are other options: A recent GAO study found that 72% of schools that added teams from 1992-1993 to 1999-2000 did so without discontinuing any teams.
Myth: Football and men's basketball finance other athletics
programs in colleges.
Fact: Most football and men's basketball teams spend much more money than they bring in. A 1999 study shows that 58% of Division I-A and I-AA football programs don't generate enough revenue to pay for themselves, much less any other sports. These programs reported annual deficits averaging $1 million and $630,000 respectively. In general, only 48 colleges brought in more money than they spent in 1999, and the annual average deficit at Division I-A colleges that year was $3.3 million.
And, how do some of the football programs spend their money?
- Some use chartered jets (instead of commercial planes) to fly their football teams to games, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Many house entire football teams in hotels the night before home games (true for virtually all Div. 1-A schools), citing the need to ensure that players get adequate rest, have quiet time to study, have their meals and fluid intake monitored, and are available for pre-game meetings.
- One university spent $120,000 to repanel the head football coach's
office in mahogany while it insisted that there wasn't enough in
school coffers to add sports opportunities for women. - Another spent over $1 million to buy out the contract of the football coach -- and cut two women's teams to save about $60,000.
- Still another institution cut its men's volleyball team to address a $2 million deficit in the athletics program, only to buy state-of-the-art titanium facemasks (and new football uniforms) for the football team four months later, becoming one of only two collegiate programs in the country to have such facemasks.
Eliminating some of these excesses would provide more resources for lower profile men's sports, as well as for women's sports.
Myth: Women just aren't interested in sports.
Fact: Title IX is a real example of "The Field of Dreams" -- if you build it, they will come. After Title IX, women's participation in intercollegiate sports skyrocketed. Before Title IX, fewer than 32,000 women participated in college sports; today that number exceeds 150,000--nearly 5 times the pre-Title IX rate, proof that interest follows opportunity.
Myth: Title IX has gone too far.
Fact: The playing field is far from level for female athletes, despite Title IX's considerable successes.
Women's athletics programs still lag behind men's programs. While 53% of the students at Division I schools are women, female athletes in Division I receive only:
- 41% of the opportunities to play intercollegiate sports,
- 43% of the total athletic scholarship dollars,
- 36% of the athletic operating budgets, and
- 32% of the dollars spent to recruit new athletes.
Spending on men's sports continues to increase and dominate spending on women's sports:
- In Division I, in 2000, for every dollar being spent on women's sports, almost two dollars are being spent on men's sports.
- Of the $3.57 million average increase in expenditures for men's Division
I-A sports programs from 1996-2000, 68% of this increase,
or $2,463,000, went to football. This amount exceeds the entire operating budget for all women's sports in 2000 by over $1,693,600.
From limited opportunities to participate to fewer scholarship dollars to inferior athletic equipment and facilities, the playing field for women and girls is far from level. Title IX is just as important as ever to remove the barriers women and girls face in sports.
This information was obtained
from The National Women's Law Center. Visit www.nwlc.org
for more information.
