Viewpoint: Title IX – The Good and the Bad

By Blair Henley

(June 19, 2012) -- I spent four years studying at Rice University, blissfully unaware of how much my tuition, books, housing and meal plan cost. My tennis scholarship covered it all; including an additional semester spent studying abroad in Australia.

April marks the 40th anniversary of the legislation that made my admittedly cushy college athletic experience a reality. Thanks to Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination within “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance,” women have athletic opportunities aplenty.

Due in part to the gutsy activism of people like Billie Jean King, I was raised in a culture that supported women in sport.

In fact I felt embarrassed after catching a recent MSNBC interview in which King explained that she won 30 tournaments before becoming the first female athlete to make $100,000 in prize money in 1971. The winner of one Grand Slam today makes close to 20 times that amount; things have come a long way.

But it wasn’t until I met and married a player on Rice’s powerhouse baseball team that I realized some of my male athlete counterparts were getting the short end of the Title IX stick.

Though there are two other ways schools can comply with the legislation, including showing a history of women’s sports expansion and “accommodating the interests and abilities of female athletes,” most schools simply try to ensure that female sports participation is proportional to overall female enrollment.

When Title IX passed in 1972, a time when men’s college attendance significantly outnumbered women’s, shooting for proportionality made perfect sense. But now many colleges have an equal split between male and female students, and some universities, particularly those without male dominated engineering schools, have a shortage of men.

On most accounts, this is great news -- until you consider the financial ramifications. With recruiting and revenue so closely tied to a school’s athletic visibility (primarily the success of the basketball and football programs), the incentive to increase funding for non-revenue sports is ever diminishing. Why add women’s sports when you can cut men’s sports and direct the funds elsewhere? And it’s not only the oft-axed wrestlers and swimmers who suffer from the effort to keep things proportional.

Consider this: A fully funded women’s tennis program gets 8 full scholarships for a team that can play a maximum of only six players at one time. A fully funded men’s tennis team is allowed just 4.5.

It doesn’t seem fair, does it? But thanks to football, a team with no female equivalent and recipient of 85 full scholarships for an active roster of just 56, men playing non-revenue sports are shorted scholarship money in an attempt to even out total fund allocation.

It seems logical to remove college football from the proportionality equation, but according to the Women’s Sports Foundation, benefits are benefits whether there is a female equivalent or not. “What if we applied laws so they excluded certain groups?” their website reads. For instance: speed limits don’t apply to football players, or tax laws don’t apply to male golfers."

Huh? Title IX has exponentially increased female sports participation and given women a push in other areas like academia, education, and employment, but the WSF reasoning leaves me puzzled. If football were taken out of the mix, it wouldn’t take away from female sports achievement, but allow men playing non-revenue sports to receive equitable opportunity and scholarship money.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the convenient excuse Title IX has become for schools that would rather spend money promoting their basketball or football teams than truly expanding programs for women and their non-revenue-producing male colleagues. Surely the federal government could not have foreseen this shift coming when they hammered out the legislative details 40 years ago.

The sports landscape has changed drastically since Title IX’s inception -- thank goodness. Now little girls who dream of being a scholarship athlete have every opportunity to achieve that goal. But when legislation no longer reflects the issues women in athletics are facing, it’s time to make adjustments where they are due.