Two-time Olympic gold medalist and former Foundation president Nancy Hogshead-Makar offers important lessons to you on Title IX.
By Nancy Hogshead-Makar
My fellow athletes, let's talk about Title IX. Speaking to you as a lawyer, I'll tell you that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972
1 prohibits discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Speaking as a fellow athlete,
Title IX is the law that prohibits a school from treating females like second-class citizens. Why is it relevant to you, the accomplished athlete, who has been lifted onto the shoulders of your teammates and paraded through the streets? Two reasons: 1) the law is your protection against stupid people, and 2) it's a part of how the next generation of athletes will be raised even higher.
Without Title IX, an athletic director or a school principal or president could wake up one morning and decide that they weren't going to support your women's sports program any more. ]They could put those funds into the men's programs because... you can fill in any silly answer here -"the men's sports make more money", "the school has a fine tradition in men's athletics that we decide to prioritize the men's team", "the men are funded by their 100 year old booster club", "women aren't as interested in sports as the men are", and "we're sorry, but we simply can't afford sports for women."
2 Without Title IX, these reasons would be valid excuses to cut your sport! Now imagine those same reasons applied to racial discrimination, rather than gender discrimination, unmask how insulting these excuses for discriminating are. "We can make more money if we don't have minorities on our teams." "The school has a fine tradition in athletics for white people." "We're sorry, but we can't afford to have minorities on our team." "But", you're thinking "our society has advanced too far - that was before the Women's World Cup soccer team, before women had run a 2:20 marathon, and before our U.S. women's Olympic teams crushed their international rivals -- a school couldn't get away with cutting women's sports." Unfortunately, these decisions aren't made by "society". They're made by a few select people, many of whom came into their positions by their association with traditional men's sports. They may have no institutional history of supporting women's sports. The school might get some bad publicity for a while, but the women athletes would have no legal recourse. Instead the athletes would have to lump it and accept the decision of perhaps just one or two people. We need the law to protect female athletes from this type of misguided person.
Next, as you've probably noticed, we're not there yet. The disparities in college scholarships provide one small example. While the Women's Sports Foundation is rightfully proud of its grant programs that distributes over a million dollars annually, Foundation grants cannot compensate for the huge disparities between men's and women's athletic scholarship funding by schools. Men receive over $200 milliion more than women in athletic scholarships every year. That's almost two billion dollars more to men than to women over the past decade. My guess is that if you think back over your athletic career, you too can come up with an example or two of inequitable treatment.
At the same time, Title IX opponents are trying to make the law the villain, with noise that "Title IX is hurting men's sports." It isn't. The
law does not require schools to cut men's teams. It's a good law, a simple law, one that comports with our basic notions of fair play and equal justice. Title IX codifies one of this country's basic principles - the United States of America doesn't allow discrimination based on immutable characteristics -characteristics we can't change - race, religion, ethnicity and gender. With that symbolic power, the law has been a force helping all women gain athletic opportunities over the past 30 years, regardless of a sport's funding sources. We need to pull together as a team to achieve gender-equity, and Title IX is one part of that effort.
Learn more by hanging out with other champion athletes at Women's Sports Foundation events.
[1] 20 U.S.C. Sections 1681-87
[2] These justifications have all been given by athletic departments that cut women's sports in legal battles within the past 15 years. Because I finished my athletic career just 18 years ago, I consider this to be very recent history