Title IX Didn’t Make College Sports Equal, It Made Them Contentious

Passed 50 years ago, to the day, Title IX was not created in order to give women more athletic opportunities—that was just a byproduct. In fact, “the [law’s] initial supporters were just as surprised as the athletic departments when it became clear that this law would also apply to sports programs,” according to feminist historian Susan Ware in comments to Sports Illustrated.

Title IX starts with:

“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.”

The words sports, athletics, or even physical education never appear in the law since the original intent of the legislation was to alleviate imbalances between men and women in education.

Title IX initially meant educational institutions had to provide both sexes with opportunities “substantially proportionate to their respective enrollments.” And a 1992 court decision determined that noncompliant schools could face lawsuits, as well as being cut off from federal funding.

But when implemented, Title IX effectively turned into a form of affirmative action for women in sports—an unsustainable quota-like system. It’s proven difficult for schools to equally allocate resources—scholarships, equipment, arenas, and budgets—across genders and sports, which has caused schools to take the easy way out by slashing male programs. Especially given that football, a huge moneymaker on college campuses, doesn’t have a female equivalent in size or impact.

In 1970, just 44 percent of women in the U.S. graduated from high school, and only 11 percent had college degrees. Today, about 91 percent of American women complete high school, with over 39 percent going on to earn degrees from colleges and universities. In 1972, only 294,015 women competed on high school sports teams. By the 2018-2019 academic year, 3.4 million women competed on high school sports teams. In the early ’70s, some 30,000 women competed on college sports teams. By 2020, that number had risen to 215,486.

Title IX did remove barriers for women and girls to participate in sports, but the implementation has been flawed, with worse outcomes than anticipated. “Things have gone from absolutely horrendous to only very bad,” Bernice R. Sandler, director of the Association of American Colleges’ Project on the Status and Education of Women, told The Washington Post, a full decade after Title IX was passed. Full equality has yet to be achieved—and in some areas, probably can’t be achieved, given the lack of equivalent women’s teams for football and basketball, for example—and this legislation continues to put colleges and universities in a bind to reach unachievable quotas.

There’s nothing in Title IX that requires schools to cut or reduce men’s opportunities in order to be compliant. But men’s teams haven’t gone unscathed in the last five decades. Title I