By Rachel Upshaw
The past 35 years have brought more opportunities to women in sports.
But a newly released study by the National Women’s Law Center believes that the playing field remains uneven.
In recognition of the 35th anniversary of Title IX, the NWLC released Barriers to Fair Play, a comprehensive analysis of Title IX complaints, as well as the results of a national poll that showed a high public support for the law.
In order to prove eradicating sexual discrimination in athletics has not yet been fulfilled, NWLC conducted an investigation, which examined 416 Title IX complaints filed with or resolved by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) from Jan. 1, 2002, to Dec. 31, 2006. These complaints “revealed that girls and women still receive fewer opportunities to participate in athletics, and when given the opportunity to be on a team, are often treated worse than their male counterparts.”
As a result of Title IX, the number of girls who participate in athletics has increased exponentially in K-12 education as well as in colleges and universities over the past three and a half decades. However, the investigation proved that discrimination against girls and women in sports remains widespread.
The investigation analyzed complaints ranging from “discrimination experienced by a single athlete to allegations of systemic violations by schools.” Sixty percent of the complaints filed challenged inequitable treatment of existing girls’ or women’s teams, and 30 percent challenged schools’ failure to provide nondiscriminatory participation opportunities for girls and women by establishing a fair number of teams or slots.
The report found that “complaints challenged discrimination against females 11 times more frequently than they challenge discrimination against males” and that “schools’ second-class treatment of female athletes, when they are given a chance to play, was a particular concern.”
Study Faults OCR for Failing To Adequately Monitor Compliance
It was also found that OCR has been “lax in fulfilling its obligation to review whether schools are complying with Title IX, so the burden of securing compliance has fallen on students and their parents.” In addition, the findings showed that although coaches are most often in the position to best identify and protest discrimination, they only file “a tiny minority of complaints and often fear retaliation when they protest.”
In K-12 education, the most common complaint was unequal treatment of female athletes playing at the school, ranging from inequitable facilities to less favorable game schedules, lesser compensation for girls’ coaches and lack of school-sponsored transportation to games compared with boys’ teams. One of the more egregious examples outlined in the report involved “a school district in Alabama in which boys’ basketball teams had separate locker rooms, matching home and away uniforms, warm-up uniforms and gym bags. The girls’ teams, by comparison, shared locker rooms with PE and other sports teams, had mismatched uniforms and missed away games because no bus drivers were available.”
The investigation showed that women at the college level also complained of inequitable facilities in addition to other complaints of unequal treatment. “Thirty-five years after the enactment of Title IX, women are still too often relegated to the bench when it comes to the facilities, equipment, coaching, publicity and other support services that they receive,” said Marcia D. Greenberger, Co-President of the NWLC.
In addition to the complaints, Barriers to Fair Play also reviewed OCR’s responsibility for “initiating assessments of Title IX compliance by federally funded educational institutions across the country.” OCR’s record of initiating such reviews revealed that it did not adequately fulfill this responsibility during the period covered by NWLC’s report. It was found that OCR conducted only one compliance review of a school’s athletics program during those five years.
NWLC believes that even though the results of their investigation into the complaints were “troubling, there is promise for change.”
A national survey on Title IX public opinion was conducted by the Mellman group, and out of the 1,000 adults polled, 82 percent were supportive of Title IX.
The survey also showed that nearly one-quarter of Americans has been personally aware of recent situations in which girls have been treated worse than boys in sports and 95 percent of those aware supported taking action to address the discrimination.
“Women and girls still face unacceptable and unlawful barriers to athletic opportunity, which continues to contribute to the ‘corrosive and unjustified discrimination against women’ that Title IX was intended to eliminate,” Greenberger said. “We must use this anniversary to recommit ourselves to making the letter and the spirit of the Title IX law a reality across all areas of education.”
Expert Compares NWLC and WSF Studies
“The NWLC’s report on OCR grievances actually compliments another important research study by John Cheslock, Ph.D.,” Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a sports law professor at Florida Coastal School of Law told Sports Litigation Alert.
The study (Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of Arizona. “Who’s Playing College Sports? Trends in Participation” Women’s Sports Foundation Research Series, June 5, 2007. http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/cgi-bin/iowa/issues/disc/article.html?record=1201) “found that growth for women’s sports slowed considerably during President Bush’s tenure, and that women were no longer catching up with their male counterparts. Opportunities for women grew at about the same rate that men’s opportunities grew, which widens the gap between men’s and women’s sports participation opportunities, particularly as more women are in college.
“These two important studies together demonstrate how President Bush’s policies affect all girls and women, first by demonstrating the lack of enforcement for Title IX violations and second for demonstrating the effect of non-enforcement on women’s sports experiences in colleges and universities. The NWLC’s study demonstrates the Bush Administration’s Department of Education and Office for Civil Rights has not been acting quickly and responsively to Title IX complaints and has not been independently evaluating schools for Title IX compliance. Additionally, it demonstrates how children – the students – are forging compliance, rather than a school’s administrators, coaches or experts at the Administrative agency,” added Hogshead-Makar.
“Meanwhile, the WSF study demonstrates how the OCR’s actions are translating into women’s sports experiences – that women are lagging further behind men’s opportunities and experience.”
