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The whole Title IX sports debate seems hollow
to me.
Women-only sports is obviously sexist. There
may be some grounds for women-only sports
analogous to over-35s sport or retard sport,
but to no-one would demand a proportionate
number of over-35s (or retards) participate
in special teams set aside for them.
sd
Those who like this sort of thing
will find this the sort of thing they like.
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In their 2001 book "The Feminist Dilemma" Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba make some interesting points about Title IX. For instance, the sweeping reduction in men's teams is not occurring to provide new opportunities for women athletes or to redistribute resources -- most of the men cut are non-scholarship reserve players. Colleges are making the cuts to make the numbers look appealing for the purpose of meeting the proportionality requirement. Nationwide, for every four male athletes eliminated, only one female is added to an athletic roster.
Also, if the Office for Civil Rights and the country's courts excluded football when they measured compliance, 55 percent of Division I institutions -- those with the most well-funded football teams -- would still not meet the proportionality standard. Kimberly Schuld of the Independent Women's Forum says "if football really is the villain that the Women's Sports Fdn and other groups claim it is, then we wouldn't be seeing so many schools that don't even have football teams still having to eliminate men's teams in order to come into compliance."
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A few years ago, I can't find the link anymore, I read an article online by (I think) the Director of Athletics at the University of Vermont. I found his suggestion very interesting.
He suggested that instead of basing support of athletics on total student population, we base it on the number of candidate athletes from each gender. He suggested something called the "exclusion model" that simply stated that every student had an equal chance of being excluded from intercollegiate athletics. The theory is that, in order to be excluded, one has to be a candidate athlete to begin with.
I think this is a good concept and I was wondering how many others agree? Is it possible we could get a letter-writing campaign together? To newspapers (the Globe would be good to start with) and to the DoE OCR?
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It is interesting that when women bring suit because of the elimination of a women's team, it is seen as being a Title IX based lawsuit; when men try to make the same argument when men's teams are eliminated, it is seen as an attempt to gut Title IX. The impression is that Title IX should protect women but not men from gender based discrimination.
Athletics is a special case for discrimination law. The existence of separate male and female teams means that there can never really be equal opportunity. Female teams exist so that females of lesser ability than males can play. A woman who has the exact same ability at basketball as a man has a greater opportunity to play, since the standards for her are lower than for a male. Looked at that way, female sports are one big affirmative action program.
It is also interesting that the coverage of the Wrestler's lawsuit depicts it as anti Title IX (as I said above) rather than anti quotas (as it is; the lawsuit challenges the 1996 administrative rule that requires quotas, not Title IX); indeed, it is a pro Title IX lawsuit that alleges sex based discrimination by the Department of Education. There is an enormous amount of spin going on here.
The quota rule is based on the notion that men and women at the college level have the same interest in playing sports (otherwise, the quota rule creates an affirmative action program, which Title IX was never intended to be). The argument is that, since interest is the same, the rates of participation should be the same, and if they are not, then discrimination must exist. The supposition that the interest levels of 18 year old men and women are the same is an odd one for feminists to make. Feminists have long maintained that the system of "Patriarchy" and gender stereotyping affects children and their interest levels, and one would expect that feminists would say that sports is included in that. One consequence of that, you'd expect their theory to conclude, is that athletic interest is promoted in boys and suppressed in girls. At age 18, interest levels should be different. But oddly, with the quota rule, feminists seem to forget that.
My personnal belief is that the interest levels in sports is different, and that the reason for the difference is complex, but biology figures largely in it.
Of interest in the Boston Globe article which trumpets female sports participation rates in the New England area coed schools is the failure to mention that the schools with the lowest rates of women in sports are the all girl schools like Smith, Wellesley, and Holyoke.
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