Sporting Women
HENARY, BETH
Sporting Women At play in the fields of Title IX. BY BETH HENARY Title IX, passed by Congress thirty years ago, states simply a non-discrimination policy concerning sex: "No person in the United...
...It was not until the Clinton administration that Title IX was enforced with an eye toward equal results...
...But when Brown University used this argument to defend itself against a suit brought by a female gymnast whose team was demoted to club status for budgetary reasons, the First Circuit Court of Appeals responded: "Interest and ability rarely develop in a vacuum...
...So, in the early 1990s, they began the only conceivable solution to their dilemma: the elimination of men's athletic teams...
...In the last decade, the statute has been invoked to secure contraceptive and abortion insurance coverage for women at New York University, to shield homosexuals from discrimination, and to argue (ineffectively, by Mary Daly) that the exclusion of men from a college class is necessary to maintain a "safe" learning space for women...
...thirty, rode this rising tide, and most of their contemporaries cultivated their skills in youth leagues, outside the reach of the law...
...Few schools meet the proportionality standard, as it is well documented that women are less interested in playing sports than men...
...Contrary to post-World Cup orthodoxy, women's athletic successes are not largely a result of Title IX...
...Gender activists care not that Title IX reverse-discriminates against men, or that it is being used to advance some truly ludicrous causes...
...Teams cut during that period and since include sixteen college baseball teams (Providence College's Big East champions included), men's swimming and diving at UCLA (a program that had produced twenty-two Olympic medallists), and Miami University men's swimming (out of which diving champion Greg Louganis had come...
...Now in Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX, Jessica Gavora describes the consequences of a law hijacked by activists who insist on equal outcomes, not equal opportunities...
...With Tilting the Playing Field, Jessica Gavora gathers the evidence necessary to suggest a return to the original intent of Title IX...
...The fact that portraying these remarkable athletes as creatures of entitlement—the welfare queens of the sports world—diminishes their achievement never seems to occur to those feminists who use them for a political agenda," Gavora laments...
...The ruling in Cohen v. Brown, which the Supreme Court declined to review, dashed the hopes of colleges who thought they could achieve compliance by showing a history of expansion or satisfied interest...
...But even with the lucrative scholarships available for women, schools found it nearly impossible to make the percentage of women athletes match that of women in the student body...
...women's World Cup soccer team defeated China in 1999, Time called the victorious women the "daughters of Title IX...
...Between 1992 and 1999, 359 sports programs for men were eliminated...
...The androgynous society promoted by Title IX radicals mocks the intelligence of the women they claim to represent...
...The device Cantu used to go after schools was an interpretation of Title IX that required them to either demonstrate gender proportionality in athletics, show a continued history of expanding sports opportunities for women, or prove their current program fully satisfied female students' demands...
...The women's movement, feminism, and a federal law—everyone except the athletes themselves—were praiseworthy...
...Where schools have not cut entire programs for men, they have limited the number of walk-ons, almost all male, and scholarships...
...For example, when the U.S...
...The biggest gains in girls' sports participation were in the 1970s, when Title IX was still largely symbolic...
...To allow a numbers-based lack-of-interest defense to become the instrument of further discrimination against the underrepresent-ed gender would pervert the remedial purpose of Title IX...
...The Providence baseball team's offer to fund itself was rejected by the school's administration—as, indeed, it had to be, for the problem wasn't money but a need to reduce the number of male athletes...
...But despite this innocuous language, modeled on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title IX has created an astonishingly broad class of victims— both male and female...
...BY BETH HENARY Title IX, passed by Congress thirty years ago, states simply a non-discrimination policy concerning sex: "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...
...Norma Cantu, Clinton's Office of Civil Rights chief in the Department of Education, responded to Title IX activists' calls, energetically auditing schools for "compliance...
...Soccer stars Michelle Akers and Brandi Chastain, both over Beth Henary is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...To read the text of Title IX is to see that Congress never intended this: "Nothing shall be interpreted to require any educational institution to grant preferential or disparate treatment to . . . one sex on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of that sex...
...But the anti-quota provision in Title IX is utterly ignored these days...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 32
