Title IX is seemingly all about sports, and yet athletics doesn’t figure in the language at all: “No person in the United States shall, on 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.”
A half-century ago today, the visionary statute formally titled “The Education Amendments of 1972” was passed on Capitol Hill, with Hawaii’s U.S. representative, the late Patsy Takemoto Mink, among its authors.
To mark today’s anniversary, a coalition of women’s groups will place a lei on Mink’s statue in front of the Hawaii State Library. A more lasting memorial, of course, is the sports field complex named for her, the Patsy T. Mink Central Oahu Regional Park.
Mink’s own inspiration to advocate for educational equity was her difficulty being accepted into medical school as a woman. The law also addresses issues such as directing government financial aid to students themselves, without a financial institution mediating.
Despite its generic wording, it’s natural that girls’ and women’s sports are seen as primary beneficiaries of Title IX.
First, athletics are rightly seen as integral to the educational experience, through high school and into collegiate years as well. Secondly, the gender separation in school programs is most visible in sports.
Gender equity had just begun its rise as a core social issue in the early 1970s, and it was easy to see the relevance to education, a major target of government spending. And though the funding gap has not entirely disappeared, it is far narrower now.
The NCAA has tracked the effects of Title IX, and they are undeniable. Forty-four percent of all NCAA athletes in the 2020-21 school year were female, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation, compared with just 15% before the law passed. The foundation also records that 294,015 girls took part in high school sports in 1972; the number in 2018-19 topped 3.4 million. All that reflects a welcome breadth of opened opportunities.
Advances have been real in student athletics, and the ripple effects certainly have reached the professional ranks. Just last month, the equal-pay fight in the U.S. Soccer Federation was settled; other sports are called on to follow on that path.
But schools across the nation also offer myriad examples of the slow pace of that progress.
Locally, in 2018, a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of students at Campbell High School used Title IX as its basis, alleging that girls had no locker room of their own or other sports facilities equal to what the boys had.
In April the suit’s class-action status was upheld, but it’s still a long way from being settled. Each year it lingers in the courts, that’s another cohort of girls who will miss out on program benefits.
Society also has become aware of inequities that go beyond strict gender divisions. Girls and women of color and female competitors with disabilities, plus those in the LGBTQ community have been chronicled as having more persistent obstacles with fairness and have reaped fewer of the Title IX benefits.
Most recently, ongoing court battles over how transgender students are allowed to compete signal that these related upheavals won’t soon be resolved, either. They raise new and distinct legal issues; however Title IX did focus attention on the long-ignored class of female students, helping to illuminate these other conflicts as well.
As frustratingly slow as progress has been within the narrower scope of Title IX itself, it has been indeed revolutionary. Such transformational advances may only come along every 50 years, well worth celebrating with each step forward.
