Executive Summary
It is the position of the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education (NCWGE) that:
- No changes to the Title IX standards as applied to athletics are warranted or necessary; the three-part test, including its proportionality prong, is an appropriate and necessary means to implement Title IX's requirement of equality.
Modifications to the standards that would limit future opportunities for women in favor of expanded opportunities for men would violate the goal of gender equity. Any modification to the standard that is based on the premise that women are less interested than men in sports, i.e. using the results of an interest survey to limit women's participation opportunities, would be both factually inaccurate and legally invalid.
What is necessary to ensure equal opportunity is vigorous federal enforcement of Title IX and its implementing policies at every level of education, not a weakening of the standards that have moved our nation toward that equality. The responsibility of the federal government is to ensure equal opportunity, not to ensure that particular sports teams are added, discontinued or maintained.
A “pull-back” on the nation's commitment to civil rights should not be precipitated by institutional financial decisions to reduce the size of men's sports programs in order to put increased emphasis on one or two selected men's sports or in other ways determine the appropriate size and expense of athletics programs.
This report demonstrates the following:
- Female athletes are not receiving equal treatment or opportunities to participate 35 years after passage of Title IX. Although male and female participation in athletics has grown steadily, female students lag in every measurable category, including participation opportunities, receipt of scholarships and allocation of operating and recruitment budgets. Furthermore, female high school athletes receive 1.3 million fewer athletic participation opportunities than their male counterparts and female athletes receive 86,305 fewer opportunities at the college level. Thus, we have not yet reached the Title IX goal of gender equity.
- The three-part test is flexible, lawful and reflects fundamental principles of equality. Most educational institutions comply with Title IX's mandate to provide equal athletics participation opportunities by expanding opportunities for the underrepresented gender or by demonstrating that they have fully accommodated the interests and abilities of the underrepresented gender. Every federal appellate court that has considered the validity of the three-part test has upheld it as constitutional and consistent with the statute. The courts have repeatedly recognized that the three-part test in no way creates quotas.
- Title IX has been wrongly blamed by its critics for cuts to some men's sports teams at some educational institutions. Schools choose to support, eliminate, or reduce particular sports opportunities on both men's and women's specific teams for a variety of reasons, including varying interests in specific sports and choices about how to allocate budget resources among the sports teams the school decides to sponsor or emphasize. The number, competitive level and quality of sports programs are individual institutional decisions, just as the number and quality of academic programs are institutional prerogatives. The government cannot dictate that particular varsity sports be added, retained or discontinued for men or women.
- As is demonstrated by the increase in women's participation in athletics since 1972, given the opportunity to play, women are just as interested in athletics as men. The remaining discrepancies in participation rates are the result of continuing discrimination in access to equal athletic opportunities – the failure of schools and colleges to add more athletic teams for females. It is neither logical nor permissible to posit a lack of interest in college sports participation on the part of female athletes when there are 2.9 million high school female athletes vying for only 209,666 college participation slots. The female athletes are there, the female college teams are not. Furthermore, female athletes receive 1.3 million fewer athletic participation opportunities than their male counterparts at the high school level and 86,305 fewer opportunities at the college level.
- Over the last five years the gap between male and female athletic participation in high school grew from 1.13 to 1.25 million opportunities. In other words, more athletics participation opportunities at the high school level were added for males at the high school level than for females despite the under-representation of females. Females comprise 49% of the high school population but only receive 41% of athletic participation opportunities: 2,953,355 girls participating versus 4,206,549 boys.
- Loss of male collegiate athletic participation opportunities is a myth. Male athletic participation continues to grow, and more male teams are added than are dropped. For every 1 collegiate athletic participation opportunity added for women between 2001-02 and 2004-05 around 1 participation opportunity has been added for men. Any losses of participation opportunities in men's sports like gymnastics, tennis or wrestling or losses of men's teams in these sports have been more than offset by increases in men's athletic participation opportunities in other sports like football, baseball, soccer and lacrosse through either roster size increases or the addition of new teams. Females comprise 57% of the college population, however they only receive 42% of athletic participation opportunities: 205,492 women participating versus 291,797 men in 1,895 community college and four-year institutions. Title IX requires equal “participation opportunities” for males and females (i.e., numbers of participants), not equal number of teams. The popularity of various sports, the size of teams and the adding and dropping of teams over time in both men's and women's sports varies widely and cannot be used to assess gender equity.
The National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education (NCWGE) makes the following recommendations:
1. Mandate Collection of Title IX Data for High Schools
Congress should pass the High School Athletics Accountability Act/High School Sports Information Collection Act, which would require high schools to report key data, including participation numbers and budgets and expenditures, which can be used to gauge schools' compliance with Title IX.
2. Rescind the March 2005 “Clarification”
The Department of Education should issue a policy statement rescinding the March 2005 Clarification and affirming the 1996 policy standards, which allow surveys to be only one of a multitude of factors schools can use to determine if they are satisfying the interests of the female students.
3. Improve Education
The OCR recognized the wide-spread misinformation about Title IX's application to athletics in 2003. Despite its commitment in 2003 to launching a national education campaign on Title IX, the OCR has failed to do so. Yet in order to see progress in sports equity, parents, athletes and schools must be educated about Title IX and be able to knowledgably raise complaints and spur enforcement. The OCR must take affirmative steps to educate school administrators of their obligations under Title IX, and inform coaches, parents and students of their rights to equality.
4. Control College Athletics Expenditures
While overall, schools have added more male teams than they have dropped, in the only competitive division showing a net loss of men's teams, NCAA Division I-A, the budgets for football and men's basketball consume nearly three quarters (73%) of the total men's athletics operating budget. While these 117 Division I-A schools may argue that this lopsided resource allocation is an investment in increasing revenues, the numbers show otherwise. In these athletic programs, supposedly the “most profitable,” 60% currently operate at an overall deficit averaging $4.4 million per year. Of all NCAA Division I and II schools, 85% currently operate at a deficit. (Fulks, 2005) Putting huge sums of money into one or two men's sports reduces the likelihood that schools will be financially capable of adding women's participation opportunities or reducing inequalities in treatment (scholarships, operating budgets, etc.) to comply with Title IX and increases the likelihood that other men's sports will be eliminated. Unless educational institutions and athletic governance organizations do more to control costs, this financial squeeze will affect all competitive divisions. Only by capping these spiraling costs will institutions be able to grow women's sports programs to comply with Title IX while maintaining existing participation opportunities for men.
5. Vigilant Enforcement
The OCR must strengthen its enforcement of Title IX. The OCR has never denied a school federal funding for failing to comply with Title IX, yet women and girls continue to be denied equal opportunities to participate and athletics and are not given equitable resources when they do compete. The OCR must initiate compliance reviews of educational institutions and not simply conduct investigations on a compliant-basis. In addition, when issuing findings in response to complaints, the OCR must be more vigilant in following through to ensure that schools actually implement their compliance improvement plans.