In the past, incrementalism has meant developing policy slowly, taking into account new information on the policy's effectiveness and its political reception. In the case of Title IX, it involves accumulating legal authority so as to avoid questions about supporting evidence, effectiveness, and political accountability.
Institutional leapfrogging is most apparent in athletics, which became a major source of controversy soon after the enactment of Title IX. Though sports are hardly an integral part of education, federal regulators have devoted tremendous attention to them because competitive sports are one of the few parts of school life still segregated by sex. We expect male and female students to compete with one another in math, English, and political-science classes; we do not expect them to compete on the athletic field.
The rules the federal government issued on athletics in were broad but vague. They applied not just to colleges, but to elementary and secondary schools.
They called for equal opportunity at all levels, from physical-education classes to intramural, club, and varsity teams. They allowed separate male and female teams, requiring only that athletic teams and facilities fairly reflect the relative "interests and abilities" of male and female students.
What this would mean in practice was anything but clear. It took nearly 20 years of institutional leapfrogging for more specific rules to emerge.
These later regulations differed from the original in two crucial ways. One of these was subject to intense debate; the other, although equally crucial, was hardly discussed at all. The controversial issue was the source of male-female differences in athletic interest. Federal judges and administrators rejected the relative "interests and abilities" standard in favor of the so-called "parity" standard.
This means schools must increase the number of female varsity athletes or reduce the number of male ones until the percentage of female varsity athletes reflects the proportion of females in the entire undergraduate student body.
Schools cannot escape this mandate by claiming that their female students are less interested in varsity sports than are male students. The clearest and most important explanation for this "parity" standard came in the First Circuit's decision in Cohen v. Brown University. Women's lower level of interest in competitive sports, the court asserted, "reflects women's historical lack of opportunities to participate in sports.
All the circuit courts that addressed the issue agreed. Ninth Circuit judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall explained that Title IX "recognizes that, where society has conditioned women to expect less than their fair share of the athletic opportunities, women's interest in participating in sports will not rise to a par with men's overnight. Congress passed Title IX to combat such discrimination and stereotypes, thereby changing the social environment in which girls and women develop, or do not develop, interests in sports.
The famous line from the movie Field of Dreams became the motto of those advocating more resources for women's sports: "If you build it, they will come. The question of whether male and female differences are entirely "socially constructed" sparked an extended debate that continues today.
What has seldom been discussed, however, is why judges and administrators focused on such a narrow slice of athletics, neglecting not just non-varsity college sports, but sports at the elementary and secondary levels.
In practice, "parity" numbers are based on roster slots on varsity teams. At Division I schools, some of which have tens of thousands of undergraduates, only about men and about the same number of women at each school play on varsity teams. Many more women participate in non-varsity college athletics. Many, many more girls participate in high-school sports.
Compared with these other forms of athletic activity, intercollegiate sports are very expensive both in terms of dollars and, at selective schools, in terms of admissions slots. So why this limited focus? One factor was administrative convenience: Varsity slots are relatively easy to count; determining the relative weight of a football team and a yoga class is hard. Just as important were organized interests.
Here the National Collegiate Athletic Association was crucial. It sponsored championships for women, created a Gender Equity Task Force, and became a major proponent of what it called "emerging sports for women.
They would jointly promote highly competitive women's sports not by cutting men's programs, but by pushing for ever-more athletic spending and more recruiting. The purpose of saying you're not going to discriminate is not to limit opportunities of the other class. We should not be talking about a zero-sum game. Women's-advocacy groups have also been quite clear about their interest in promoting the most competitive levels of sports.
For example, the NWLC opposed allowing Florida to count flag football as an interscholastic sport because high-school students cannot go on to play varsity flag football in college. According to the former president of the WSF, girls receive educational benefit from a sport only if they take it seriously: "That's one of the things that makes sports such an important experience.
You're always striving to get to that next rung. The WSF is run in part by former professional athletes, so it's natural that they would encourage colleges to provide a pipeline for their sports. Other women's groups followed their lead largely because they see intercollegiate sports as a powerful mechanism for promoting new role models that challenge conventional stereotypes about feminine weakness and passivity.
Through intercollegiate sports, girls can see inspiring, strong women, and recognize that sports can be a ticket to college admissions and scholarships. The value of women's college sports thus rests in large part on their visibility.
But what if colleges build women's sports teams and nobody comes? Recognizing this problem, the Obama administration found that a number of colleges had failed to provide "equal athletic opportunities to students of both sexes with regard to publicity.
The target of this form of education is not students, but the public at large. Similarly, in the Seventh Circuit required an Indiana high school to schedule more girls' basketball games on Fridays and Saturdays. It argued that relegating girls' games to "non-primetime" results "in a loss of audience" and "foster[s] feelings of inferiority" that depress girls' interest in basketball: "[D]isparate scheduling creates a cyclical effect that stifles community support, prevents the development of a fan base, and discourages females from participating in a traditionally male dominated sport.
Is spending more money on a small number of varsity athletes and giving large admission boosts to female hockey goalies and point guards good for women's education? After fighting a long losing battle in the First Circuit, Brown University president Vartan Gregorian bitterly concluded that, "by judicial fiat," women's sports "have risen past all other priorities including undergraduate scholarships, faculty salaries and libraries.
Furthermore, evidence suggests that this increased focus on sports may be impeding women's educational achievement. An important study by William Bowen and his co-authors found that in the s, before Title IX regulations took hold, female college athletes had high-school records similar to non-athletes.
They did just as well in college and were more likely to earn graduate degrees. But by the s, female athletes had significantly weaker high-school records than non-athletes, and in college did even worse than their high-school records might have indicated.
Having devoted much of their young lives to a single sport, many of them had not developed intellectual interests. May 20, Sen. The amendment is rejected. July In the spirit of Sen. Jacob Javits submits an amendment directing the U. July 8, Rep. This bill dies in committee before reaching the House floor. July 21, Congress reviews and approves Title IX regulations and rejects the following resolutions and bills that had been advanced in an attempt to disprove the athletics regulations 2 :.
Title IX federal regulations are issued in the area of athletics. High schools and colleges are given three years, and elementary schools one year, to comply. The suit would be dismissed in July 15, Sens. Tower, Dewey F. Bartlett, and Roman Hruska introduce S.
As a result, in there were just 30, women participating in NCAA sports, as opposed to , men. Title IX was designed to correct those imbalances. In high school, the number of girl athletes has increased from just , in to more than 2.
In college, the number has grown from 30, to more than , In addition, Title IX is credited with decreasing the dropout rate of girls from high school and increasing the number of women who pursue higher education and complete college degrees.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Although the women did not win their case, the District Court upheld this legal view, ruling that, "It is perfectly reasonable to maintain that academic advancement conditioned upon submission to sexual demands constitutes sex discrimination in education.
As a result of the case, Yale, along with most U. At a pivotal moment in Title IX history, these women contributed to the emerging concept of sexual harrasment. David and Myra Sadker, both professors at American University, have been lifelong educators and leaders in advocating equal education opportunities. Myra Sadker, who personally experienced gender discrimination throughout her own education, pioneered the research that documented gender bias in America's schools.
In , she wrote the first book on U. In , she and her husband David co-authored the first popular book on sexism, Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls , bringing the issue of gender equity in education to a national audience. Together, they have spoken in more than forty states and overseas, giving hundreds of presentations and workshops for teachers and parents concerned with the devastating impact of sexism in the classroom. In scores of articles and in over a dozen research studies supported by federal grants, they documented and publicized this persistent barrier to educational equity.
Myra Sadker died in while undergoing breast cancer treatment, but her work is carried on by her husband and the Myra Sadker Foundation, which continues her efforts to create more equitable and effective schools by granting awards and scholarships to promote gender equity.
Benita Miller was born to teen parents and later found herself a young single mother in law school. After graduating, she worked as a childrens' attorney for Legal Aid, where she became even more acutely aware of the struggles of young mothers to continue their education and realize their full potential. Inspired to help address the situation, she went on to found the Brooklyn Young Mother's Collective BYMC , an organization that provides legal information, advocacy training and social services support for pregnant teens and young mothers.
Miller continues to be an outspoken advocate against the many barriers that continue to derail students from staying in school during pregnancy and once they give birth, and has become a national expert on the issues confronting pregnant and parenting teens. While there is still much work to be done on behalf of assisting pregnant teens and young mothers, through the BYMC, Miller has developed a model that engages pregnant teenagers and provides them with many crucial resources to help them thrive as young mothers.
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