A national women’s advocacy group and the NCAA have denounced a new Department of Education advisory that will make it easier for universities to demonstrate compliance with federal gender-equity protections in college sports.
Curve ball:
The guidance allows the use of electronic surveys by university administrators to confirm that a school is providing enough programs to satisfy the interests and abilities of its female students, according to the Education Department.
Known as “Title IX,” current federal statutes provide schools three options for demonstrating the absence of discrimination in sports programs: making availability of varsity sports programs proportional to the overall ratio of men and women attending a college campus, showing a progressive increase of women’s athletic opportunities through the creation of sports teams and showing that the interests of underrepresented minorities are being met. Schools who cannot prove their compliance with at least one of the criteria risk losing government funding.
In years past, some schools have attempted to justify a lower number of women’s varsity teams by using the last option through surveys that showed a lack of interest in additional sports teams on the part of women. Many of them, however, have been the target of lawsuits, so proportionality was the only safe option to demonstrate compliance with Title IX, according to College Sports Council spokesman Jim McCarthy. The group represents a national coalition of coaches, parents and student athletes.
This, however, has led universities to reduce the number of men’s sports in order to satisfy the quota for proportional men’s and women’s teams, McCarthy said. In the 1970s, the law’s authors envisioned that it would instead lead the number of female teams to increase.
“Virtually every school has cut men’s teams or placed an artificial limit on the men’s roster to make proportionality fit,” McCarthy said. “It’s totally unfair; reform has been needed for a long time.”
The elimination of men’s “nonrevenue” sports teams that bring in little money for campuses, such as wrestling and swimming, in order to prove gender equity has also had a negative effect on female athletes in the form of lost training partners, McCarthy said.
“In cases like Olympic sports, the men and women train together,” McCarthy said. “If you cut the men’s team, the women’s team loses its training partner, which often helps the athletes when they train with men. Men and women should be teammates in sports, not adversaries competing for the same spot on the field.”
On March 17, the Education Department offered additional details clarifying how surveys can be implemented to allow schools to prove the interest criteria of Title IX, providing a model survey that “gives schools one new tool for accurately and comprehensively assessing the athletic interests of their students,” Education Department Director of Public Affairs Chad Colby said.
Because schools now have an officially sanctioned model to use when measuring students’ athletic interests, the surveys will be given greater weight in assessing compliance with Title IX, according to Colby. Used in conjunction with other factors, a survey showing that few female students want to compete in sports would allow schools to offer fewer women’s teams than they provide for their male counterparts, without risking the loss of federal funding.
However, the National Women’s Law Center has expressed concern over how accurately surveys can measure the interests of the female student body, warning that the change could be a way for schools to escape their obligations to provide equal opportunities for women and men.
“This is simply an underhanded way to weaken Title IX and make it easy for schools that aren’t interested in providing equal opportunity for women to skirt the law,” NWLC Co-President Marcia D. Greenberger stated in the group’s press release.
The NCAA shares the same concerns over the methodology of an e-mail survey providing an adequate representation of the interest at the schools, according to NCAA Managing Director of Public and Media Relations Bob Williams.
Furthermore, the survey does not “encourage young women to participate — a failure that will likely stymie the growth of women’s athletics and could reverse the progress made over the last three decades,” NCAA President Myles Brand stated in a press release.
Colby, however, defended the surveys as a method for a school to ensure equal opportunity for female athletes, rather than a way of bypassing that responsibility, by “fully and effectively accommodating the athletic interests and abilities of its female students,” and possibly even creating new programs for women if the surveys show adequate need and interest.
“In many instances, it will identify the need to create a women’s team where that need may not otherwise have been identified,” Colby said.
The survey will provide the most accurate measure of the abilities and interests of the female students because it asks them directly what sports they want to participate in, rather than assuming the need for more women’s teams at the cost of unprofitable men’s teams, McCarthy said.
“What could be an easier, more straightforward way to find out which sports to have than to ask [the women] what sports they want to participate in?” McCarthy said. “To imply that women’s sports will be discounted is utterly ridiculous.”
Critics of the new advisory have also been criticized for not soliciting public input on the new policy. Several years ago, the Bush administration faced stiff opposition from lawmakers when it suggested making similar changes, which were never enacted.
However, Colby said the department did not need to follow the more cumbersome bureaucratic procedures usually required for regulatory changes because the new advisory is simply a “clarification” and does not change current legal compliance mandates.
