The beast that killed our baseball team is back. And this time, it’s coming for your beakers.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, or Title IX for short, was designed to reduce gender discrimination in public schools. It decreed that nobody could “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” any federally-funded educational program on the basis of sex.
Title IX was applied most rigorously in college and high school-level athletics. In theory, this was a good way to use a good law. In the hairy, hairy 1970s, men dominated the field while women were left neglected in the stands. Few opportunities existed for female students to participate in athletics — not because they weren’t interested, but because the old and decrepit administrators of many high schools and colleges still carried with them the ’50s mentality that fans would have no interest in watching a bunch of girls play and that women were designed for less physical activities, like embroidering. Since the passage of Title IX, however, the number of women participating in college athletics has increased fivefold, according to the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education. Title IX allowed these female students to pursue their interests by ensuring that they had relatively equal opportunity to participate in their school’s athletics.
The Department of Education, however, enforced this good law in the most inane, boneheaded way possible. Beginning in 1979, the Department rabidly enforced Title IX by thrusting a rigid quota upon public schools throughout the ensuing decades. This quota required that the ratio of male to female athletes be proportionate to the ratio of male-to-female students enrolled at the school, without bothering to discover if more women were interested in becoming athletes at a particular school. As a result, many athletic programs that couldn’t afford to add more women’s teams were forced to drop men’s teams to meet the quota, even if the demand for the men’s teams was greater than that for a potential women’s team. The University of Wisconsin had to drop baseball, gymnastics and fencing in 1991 to meet the quota. To this day, Madison remains the only Big Ten campus without a baseball team.
Now, the attention of Title IX has turned to science and engineering departments. Federal agencies have been searching for signs of gender discrimination in these areas at colleges across the country. Just last spring, the Department of Energy audited UW’s graduate physics program and will release a report by the end of the year.
Make no mistake: neither the Department of Energy nor any other federal agency is requiring any kind of quota similar to the one imposed on athletics. In fact, the government currently has no strategy for enforcing Title IX in science and engineering, or even a definition of “discrimination” in those areas. However, given the rigid, inflexible way in which Title IX was applied to athletics, many are wary of similar enforcement of Title IX in academics.
No one contests that women are a minority in engineering and the physical sciences — in 2006 women made up just 28 percent of those who were awarded doctorates in the physical sciences and 20 percent of those in engineering, according to an excellent article on Title IX in last week’s edition of the Capital Times. And the percentage of women decreases even further up the academic ladder — although women earned 28 percent of the doctorates in physical sciences, they made up just 16 percent of assistant professors in those areas, 14 percent of associate professors and 6 percent of full professors.
Critics claim an “unconscious bias” causing employers and faculty to turn down women’s r?sum?s in favor of men’s, causing the increasing scarcity of women with each level of college physics and engineering programs. I’m sure this bias exists to some degree — in such a male-dominated environment, a woman physicist does not match most people’s conceptions of a stereotypical, “normal” physicist, and this disparity could very well lead employers and professors to unconsciously favor a male student over a female one. However, while federal agencies should do as much as they can to enforce Title IX in academics, they should not do it in the same moronic way they enforced it in athletics, for all the same reasons and more. A subtle, unconscious bias is not a measurable quantity. No one is saying that women shouldn’t participate in these fields — unlike the athletic heads of the ’50s — and it is impossible to know how much of the lack of gender diversity is caused by a hidden bias lurking somewhere in society and how much is caused by fewer women being interested in physics and engineering. And although the government must ensure the equal opportunity of every one of its citizens, it cannot stamp a quota of numbers over a problem for which no numbers can be empirically gathered. We must address the issue on a case-by-case, play-by-play basis, or else everyone loses.
Jack Garigliano ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and English.
