The act was significant; the media attention was not. Buried beneath 32 pages of a 1972 issue of The New York Times was an article about Title IX. Buried as it was, the topic of the article would change America forever.
The official text of Title IX states, “No person 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 aid …”
Some say the act brought the end to gender-based discrimination in schools, but others suggest discrimination changed fronts.
Before Title IX, funding for gender-based programs in schools receiving federal funding was heavily discriminatory in favor of males. A prime example of this occurred at New Brunswick High School in New Jersey.
The school offered ten sports for men and three for women, with the split in funding being $25,575 to $2,250 in favor of the men.
The funding for the boys’ track team was $3,700 and for the girls it was $1,000. This might be considered better than average for the time, except for the fact that 70 New Brunswick students competed on the girls’ team and only 20 on the boys’ team.
The rise in women’s sports is attributed to Title IX.
“I think the gender thing [in academics] is pretty settled,” said Donald Downs, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin. “I mean, you just don’t discriminate.”
While discrimination in academics appears to be settled, many argue Title IX is actually discriminating against men when it comes to intercollegiate athletics.
The original interpretation of Title IX was comprised of three tests used to judge whether an institution was in compliance with Title IX.
The first and most controversial test shows that intercollegiate athletic opportunities for men and women are provided in numbers proportionate to their respective enrollments. That is, in a school where the students are 50 percent men and 50 percent women, the varsity athletic participation must also be 50 percent men and 50 percent women.
Universities choosing not to comply with the policy interpretation would have to forfeit any federal funding they received.
“It’s not doing what the original intent of the law was intended to do,” said Jesse Krebs, CEO of the Wrestling Mall. “The women’s agenda is pushing it as such, and they don’t care if they are hurting men or not. The original intent of the law was not to discriminate against males or females on the basis of sex in all of college or an institution that receives federal funding — throughout the entire university in dance choir, band, physics, math or anything.”
A recent money-saving trend in higher education has been to slash unsuccessful sports programs. Krebs pointed out 372 wrestling programs dropped since Title IX’s enactment, the most of any intercollegiate sport.
According to the University of Iowa Gender Equity in Sports project, when Title IX was enacted, only 294,015 girls participated in high school sports compared to 3,666,917 boys. By 1994-95, the number of girls participating in sports had skyrocketed to 2,240,461 compared to 3,535,359 boys.
“I’m not against women participating,” Krebs said. “I have a sister, a girlfriend and who knows, one day I might have a daughter and I want them to have every opportunity to participate as much as anyone else. It’s coming down to a quota system of numbers, and that’s not right.”
