Men and women deserve equal athletic opportunities. Female athletes work every bit as hard as male athletes. As a spectator, though, football will always have my heart; I enjoyed the women’s soccer games last year and had an absolute blast at the gymnastics’ Power of Pink meet.
The unintended consequences of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, however, are hurting men’s athletic opportunities across the country.
Title IX was written in 1972 and states that “no person in the United States shall, on the 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…”
In the seventies, the act was much needed. Women experienced widespread discrimination in both athletics and academics. Considerably fewer women’s intercollegiate teams existed, and the ones that did were grossly underfunded.
In the immediate aftermath of Title IX, many programs tried to prolong the discrimination via clever budgeting loopholes to restructure which areas received federal funding. Some programs just outright ignored the act.
To combat this non-compliance, the department of Health, Education and Welfare wrote a policy interpretation known as the Title IX “three prong test for compliance.” A university must comply with only one of the three prongs.
An institution can comply by following the first prong, by “providing athletic participation opportunities that are substantially proportionate to student enrollment,” by prong two, “demonstrating a continual expansion of athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex” or by prong three, “full and effective accommodation of the interest and ability of the underrepresented sex.”
When the three-prong test was written in 1979, females were of course the underrepresented sex and, since then, the number of Division I women’s teams has increased by 450 percent. Title IX worked.
We are now seeing the unintended consequences of the three-prong test. Men’s athletic programs are being cut to even the gap between the number of men and women’s athletic participants. In 2008, there were 3,347 women’s intercollegiate teams to just 2,855 men’s teams. 170 men’s golf teams and 132 men’s rowing teams have been cut in the past fifteen years alone.
Women’s athletics should be given every opportunity to flourish, but not at the expense of men’s athletics.
What really matters is how well we accommodate each sex’s interest, not how well we can juxtapose them and get the results to match. We don’t even have the same number of men and women at the University, so we’re already starting with skewed statistics. The 54 to 46 percent female to male ratio makes it even harder for us to comply with prong one.
Football is the elephant in the room. With the number of players we keep on our roster, other men’s sports are forced to cut roster spots or be eliminated entirely. Our non-existent men’s soccer, volleyball, crew, and gymnastics teams shouldn’t suffer because Alabama loves football.
Womenssportsfoundation.org responds to this issue by saying “if men want to use 100 participation opportunities playing football, that’s fine. If women want to use 100 participation opportunities playing soccer, softball and field hockey, that’s fine too.” Their argument assumes that there is a scarcity of “participation opportunities” to be had, but this isn’t the case at all.
The University just signed a 30 million dollar contract with Nike, so it’s safe to say we have the funding to support any team of either sex for which there is adequate interest.
We have more than ten different Christian organizations on campus, yet only one atheist/agnostic organization. We recognize the quantity of these opposing clubs as appropriate because they both satisfy the given level of interest, not because they are equal when compared to each other.
This isn’t to say that women are less interested in sports; it’s to say that men are equally interested in our missing sports. If there is any evidence that suggests a given gender’s overall interest in athletics, it would be the fact that, even after removing football and basketball, the median men’s division one program still nets an average $2.6 million compared to $375,000 for the median women’s program. Either concessions cost considerably more at men’s sporting events than at women’s events of the same sport, or men are just packing the stands more.
Even the wording of the three-prong test essentially ties men’s hands behind their backs. The only argument men could make would be that their interests are not being effectively accommodated (prong three), yet this prong only applies to the underrepresented sex, not to both sexes.
Even self-proclaimed women’s-rights advocate John Irving described the current version of Title IX as “purely vindictive.” I’ll cheer as loud as anyone at my next soccer game, but please, let’s get men back on the field.
Ben Friedman is a sophomore majoring in social entrepreneurship. His column runs bi-weekly on Wednesdays.
