How do people around here feel about Title IX?

[AgentLadyBug]

was just listening to NPR story about a girl wrestler, and was thinking about it.... is there a full range of opinions in these parts, or just the standard "it helps to level the playing field with boys, so it's good"?

[wuushew]

1. Another progressive piece of legislation from the Nixon era

I am convinced that if this current dark streak that is the * administration continues Nixon will be remembered as a liberal in whatever history survives WW III and WW IV.

[Reverend_Smitty]

2. I support Title IX but...

I had to write a paper about Title IX and there is no doubt that it has helped advance women's sports. However many less "popular" or I should really say marketable men's sports like wrestling have suffered, and its not fair to them.

But I think thats because the colleges did not cut the budgets for their football and basketball teams to make way for women's sports, instead they made the other teams cut their budgets. It's really a matter of dollars and cents with the colleges, basketball and football bring millions in revenue to the schools and wrestling does not. So when athletic departments had to choose where the money to fund women's teams came from, it was kind of a no brainer to them. Which isn't right.

[mouse7]

7. We should be increasing athletic participation, not funding team sports

The proper goal should be to maximize increased athletics across the school age population. The goal should not be protecting certain team sports which had been popular in ages past.

[Bridget Burke]

3. A good idea....

Both my nieces earned athletic scholarships to college. They got good educations without putting themselves or their parents into debt.

They also have never had to diet to maintain good figures.

[mouse7]

4. Title IX is absolutely necessary

To me, the whole point of sports in schools is to get young people more physically active. College athletic scholarships are the carrot that's used to get millions of school age students involved in athletics.

I consider the actual scholarships themselves a secondary issue. The primary issue is what we have to do to get our school age kids more healthy. Sports helps do that, and females need exercise every bit as much as males do. It was ridiculous to have basically left females out of that in the past. If Title IX is eliminated the country go back to having only males rewarded for being physically active, and female participation in physical activities bottoms out again.

[KalamazooKid]

5. i may not be the most

objective person to comment on this, but I tend to favor it since i am a rabid womens NCAA basketball fan. Without title IX womens basketball would barely exist. Title IX may not be perfect (it's definitely hurt mens gymnastics, and gymnastics as a whole). But on the balance, I think its a good thing.

[qazplm]

8. great in theory

needs work in practice.

There has to be a way to support women's athletics without cutting some of the non-revenue mens sports that have been cut. Men's wrestling, gymnastics, volleyball, soccer, these are all relatively inexpensive sports that have had to be cut.

I would prefer a standard that is less of a strict quota type nature, but with severe penalties for dropping the ball. Ideally, the environment should be one where anyone male or female who wants to participate in a sport (and is able) has adequate avenues to do so.

What that means is though to me that we arent talking a 50-50 split. If more women than men want to be involved with sports at School A, then the sports environment reflects that, and if more men than women at school B then same there.

What shouldnt happen though is that at school B just because there are more men it means women get the shaft (no pun intended).

[Piltdown13]

9. That was the original intent -- allowing opportunities

for anyone who wanted to play, regardless of gender. And in fact, if I recall correctly, one way schools can demonstrate compliance with Title IX is by showing that they are indeed providing adequate athletic opportunities to the women who want to play. So, what you're suggesting is, IIRC, already an option.

Problem is, it would be quite difficult to quantify the true level of interest in playing sport among a college's women such that everyone was satisfied that the measure was accurate. Which is why the vast majority of schools have chosen to demonstrate Title IX compliance by working towards bringing the proportion of female athletes into line with the proportion of female students -- that's something that can easily be quantified.

Unfortunately, the by-the-numbers approach has led to some schools dropping non-revenue men's sports in order to achieve this balance (rather than, say, increasing their athletics budgets to allow for more women's opportunities), especially in recent years when many colleges have more women than men in their undergraduate populations (and thus should have more women than men athletes -- unlikely given the still-unbalanced situation in many local school systems). It's these actions by the schools, rather than Title IX itself, that are responsible for the resentment that has been created among men whose sports have been dropped.

It's definitely a frustrating issue. My undergrad school got a lot of heat regarding Title IX non-compliance while I was there, despite the fact that it was taking very positive steps towards compliance (the school is, BTW, one of the institutions with more women than men overall -- I think it was about 54% female when I was there) -- it had raised a few women's club sports to varsity level (i.e., scholarships, etc.) and did research among the student body to determine what other women's sports might have the greatest chance of success if added (rather than just randomly adding women's sports with no history that then had difficulty attracting enough participants, as has happened at some schools). This still wasn't enough to bring the ratios in line, though -- what finally did it was that, for financial reasons, the university dropped the football team (the football team was Division I-AA, so there was basically no revenue for football, and the team was just terrible, so no butts in the seats either).

I've often wondered if perhaps there ought to be some sort of exception or adjustment made for schools that have football teams, as there's really no women-only sport that requires nearly as many players as football does. Those football roster spots are indeed sports opportunities open to men, but then again there are many athletic programs that would have achieved and exceeded compliance long ago if not for football. I'm kind of torn between worrying that we penalize male athletes just because they happen to be the near-exclusive players of the most roster-heavy sport there is and thinking that each slot on ANY team is an athletic opportunity that should be balanced on the women's side, assuming of course there's interest.

[Bandit]

6. In a Republican America it can't work

Colleges will not have the funding necessary to treat all equally. Mens football is the sport that brings in the revenue and when it becomes threatened because of fairness to women then the program will end. Women do not matter to Republicans as they are just property to be subservient to men as the Lord said. Don't you know women should be home making cookies and cleaning the house and not out trying to compete with men in sports or occupation.

[VelmaD]

11. Actually most football programs don't generate revenue

Here's what I found in a quick google search:

http://www.savetitleix.com/overview.html
Myth: Football and men’s basketball finance other athletics programs in colleges.

Fact: Most football and men’s basketball teams spend much more money than they bring in. A 1999 study shows that 58% of
Division I-A and I-AA football programs don’t generate enough revenue to pay for themselves, much less any other sports. These programs reported annual deficits averaging $1 million
and $630,000 respectively. In general, only 48 colleges brought in more money than they spent in 1999, and the annual average deficit at Division I-A colleges that year was $3.3 million.

[jmowreader]

10. It needs revision

I think Title IX was, and is, a good thing. This, however, is what happens in a number of schools...

All schools have two kinds of sports: revenue sports and Olympic sports. Revenue sports pay for Olympic sports. At most schools that have the full panoply of NCAA-approved sports, football and men's basketball are revenue sports; at powerhouses like UConn and Tennessee, women's basketball is also a revenue sport.

Before Title IX, a school would fund the hell out of its men's sports programs because "the men are paying for this, they should receive the benefit." Now they have to maintain equality between the men's programs and the women's programs.

No one's quite figured out what "equality" is. Is it number of students participating? If so, football screws up the works--a college football team has over 60 men on it. Is it dollars spent on the program? Once again, football screws up the works.

Statistics prove that women are less likely to compete in collegiate athletics than men. That runs all the way from intramurals to NCAA-ranked championship programs. IIRC it's something like 45 percent of the women against 55 percent of the men.

There are four solutions to this problem that don't violate Title IX as it is currently written; none are real good.

The first is to attempt to increase participation in the women's sports that currently exist by the student body that currently exists. If they're not playing now, will glossy brochures with lots of spot-enameled, soft-edged photos of perfectly-groomed women dribbling soccer balls downfield going to encourage them to do so? I've created those brochures myself and they don't work.

The second is to add more women's sports--which explains why Cheerleading is now a scholarship sport at every college in America.

Third is to cut men's sports. A department that relies on its football and men's basketball programs will not eliminate them, but it will eliminate its men's wrestling program. (It won't eliminate men's golf because college golf is beginning to get prestigious--especially at Division II level.)

The last, which is probably illegal, is to use athletic participation as part of the selection criteria for prospective female students. If you don't take female students who won't play ball--pun not intended--you don't have Title IX problems.

The best way to do it is to adjust the equal-access criteria. If a school's revenue sports (football, men's and women's basketball) produce more than 50 percent (or should it be 75 percent?) of the funding for the Olympic sports program, and the school is willing to create two athletics departments, a Revenue Sports Department and an Olympic Sports Department, revenue sports will not be included in equal-access evaluations.