A Title IX godfather inspires “dadflies”

Herb Dempsey is a Title IX “godfather” who has inspired other gadfly fathers — dubbed “dadflies” by Sports Illustrated — to fight for equity in education for at least 30 years. In honor of Fathers Day this month and to celebrate the 52nd birthday of Title IX on June 23, I’ve put together a video of Dempsey talking about one of his favorite topics — fairness. It’s also my way of honoring the many thousands of citizen-volunteers who have organized and advocated for equity under Title IX through the decades. Why do I call Dempsey a godfather of Title IX? […]

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Title IX rules finalized and evolving

The U.S. Department of Education finalized new Title IX rules that illustrate the ever-evolving ways our society tries to battle sex discrimination in education. It’s fair to say that we’ve made great progress in the last 52 years since Congress passed Title IX, and that these efforts remain a work in progress. For highlights of the changes, see below. But first, a brief recap: Under former President Trump, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos changed the Title IX regulations for the first time in more than 40 years. Key changes made it harder for students to get help for sexual harassment and […]

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Proposed Title IX transgender rules delayed

The U.S. Department of Education will delay its proposed Title IX transgender rules until after the 2024 elections, news outlets report. The proposed regulations would prevent broad bans against transgender students participating in athletics, a practice being considered in dozens of states in recent years. The Biden Administration earlier had separated the proposed athletics rules for transgender student participation from other proposed revisions to the Title IX regulations designed to undo some of the changes made by former President Trump and his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The Trump changes especially related to how schools respond to sexual assaults and harassment. […]

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NCAA sexism clouds basketball records

During Women’s History Month and March Madness 2024, NCAA sexism clouds the all-time record-breaking greatness we’re witnessing in intercollegiate basketball. It’s a pity. The NCAA’s actions distract from the achievements of University of Iowa basketball great Caitlin Clark, who this month scored more points than any other collegiate basketball player ever, woman or man. And in the process, the NCAA disrespected the highest-scoring women’s basketball player before Clark, Lynette Woodard. That’s a pity, though I can’t say it’s a surprise. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has a long history of trying to block and minimize women’s sports that continues […]

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Title IX history going and coming

This month, October 2023, marks two milestones in Title IX history — one of a Title IX foremother going to her rest and one marking 10 years of today’s youth coming into the next chapter of Title IX advocacy. Margot Polivy, a crucial player in Title IX’s early years, died at the age of 85 on October 7. Along with another Title IX foremother, Margaret Dunkle, Polivy did more that almost anyone else to ensure that Title IX would provide fairer treatment for girls and women in school sports. Above is an excerpt of my video interview with her in […]

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Schools backsliding on sports equity

The law that banned sex discrimination in education — Title IX — is 51 years old, yet schools are backsliding on sports equity. A new analysis shows that the illegal disparities between school sports for girls or boys, women or men, have grown 18% since 2001. Nearly 90% of U.S. colleges and universities today discriminate against women in sports opportunities — discrimination that then denies women students an estimated $1.1 billion in potential athletics scholarships. For the first time, the analysis by the nonprofit legal organization Champion Women includes not just higher education but high schools. That’s a major accomplishment […]

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Title IX discussion questions available

If your class or book group would like to talk about the ideas and stories raised in my book 37 Words, I’ve got some Title IX discussion questions for you! And if you’d like me to Zoom in on the discussion, that could be arranged. Reach me through my contact page. 37 Words – Suggested Discussion Questions Chapter 1: Strong — 1969 Chapter 2: Complaints — 1970 Chapter 3: Congress – 1970-1972 Chapter 4: Implementation – 1972-1977 Chapter 5: Sexual Harassment – 1977-1980 Chapter 6: Enforcement – 1975-1979 Chapter 7: Backlash – 1980-1990 Chapter 8: Christine, Jackie, Rebecca, Nicole, Alida, LaShonda […]

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Talking Title IX in Maine

Join me for three events this week in the Pine Tree State, where I’ll be talking about Title IX in Maine. The Portland Press Herald published a Commentary by me with a preview of some of what I’ll say. (And in case you missed it, here’s an earlier version published March 24 by the Concord Monitor.) The rights of transgender students to play school sports is one big topic, of course — see the latest news below under “Elsewhere.” It helps to have an understanding of Title IX history to talk about this issue intelligently and compassionately. And we’ll also […]

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Fair Play for Women proposed

Three U.S. Congresswomen and a senator proposed the Fair Play for Women Act to address ongoing inequities in school athletics 50 years after Title IX outlawed such discrimination. The legislation would make a number of significant changes. In a nutshell: It gives the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights a new enforcement tool besides the “nuclear option” of withholding all federal funds from a school that’s violating Title IX — a punishment so severe it’s never been used. The Fair Play for Women Act would allow the government to fine schools who discriminate in athletics. Elementary and high schools […]

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Schools ignore Title IX with impunity

Many schools ignore Title IX with impunity, a stellar investigation by USA Today found. In the final installment of its 2022 series of investigations for Title IX’s 50th anniversary, USA Today reported on its year-long study of letters and agreements between the federal Office for Civil Rights and universities in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision. (An aside: USA Today deserves a Pulitzer for this series, imho.) Schools that practice sex discrimination have little to fear from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is charged with enforcing Title IX and other civil rights laws. Too many universities brashly […]

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Video: athletes see the differences in treatment

Rather than read the case files of recent Title IX lawsuits, you can easily get the picture through this short video of athletes describing how they see differences in their schools’ treatment of girls’ and boys’ sports. In this case, it’s royal treatment for baseball and shabbier treatment for softball. It’s an age-old story, unfortunately. A half-century after Title IX outlawed this kind of discrimination, it’s all too common. Girls (and their parents) still have to sue to get school officials to fix it. And girls everywhere almost always win those suits. (Top photo: A screen shot of an athlete […]

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Time for Congress to enforce Title IX in sports?

Fifty years of failure to stop sex discrimination in school athletics means that it’s time for Congress to help enforce Title IX in sports, an influential think tank proposed. If schools with athletics programs want federal funding (which nearly all schools and colleges currently receive), they should be compelled to meet a new requirement, the Drake Group suggested. Their sports programs should be governed by an athletic conference or similar organization that mandates compliance with Title IX by its member schools before they can compete for post-season championships, says Andrew Zimbalist, president of the group’s board of directors. Only then […]

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Women’s Equality Day includes education

Women’s Equality Day on August 26 includes the struggle for equity in education, which handily illustrates how movements for various aspects of women’s rights are never really separate from each other. On that date in 1920, U.S. women won the right to vote, though racism limited access to voting mainly to white women for the following 44 years until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Author and activist Betty Friedan surprised her feminist allies in 1970 by calling for a Women’s Strike for Equality, urging women to pour into the streets on August 26. And they did all […]

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37 Words coming to Korea

Good news — The publisher Wisdom House has licensed the rights to publish a translation of 37 Words in Korea! I’m surprised, I’ll admit. I figured that my history of Title IX and the struggle against sex discrimination in U.S. schools would be of interest only in the United States. I was wrong. Korea has a vibrant feminist movement. Not only will the book be coming to Korea, but this week Tel Aviv University in Israel held a conference on women in sports featuring a Zoom panel with me and others discussing Title IX. Apparently, some people in Israel feel […]

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Where are “protectors” of women’s sports now?

The self-designated “protectors” of women’s sports who loudly oppose allowing a few transgender girls and women to compete remain oddly silent about practices that unfairly give hundreds of women’s playing slots to cisgender men year after year after year. An excellent USA Today article this week exposed some of the ways that college athletics programs routinely shortchange women’s teams. Three big ones: counting men who practice with women’s teams as women, double-counting women athletes, and packing so many women onto a team that most never get a chance to play, instead of creating more teams for women. For example, I […]

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Potential big deal for Title IX lawsuits

A little-noticed legal ruling this week could be a big deal for Title IX lawsuits going forward. If I’m reading this right, colleges and universities could be held accountable not only for cases in which they were deliberately indifferent to reports of sexual harassment and assault after they happened. They could also be held accountable for inadequate management of campus sexual violence before the next attacks occur because their actions (or lack of them) increased the risk for more victims, violating Title IX. What does that look like in real life? The ruling from a three-judge Appeals Court panel gave […]

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Confronting child sex trafficking on campus

Child sex trafficking isn’t the first thing most people think of when they consider sexual harassment and assault in higher education. But it’s more common than you may think. And perpetrators are almost all white, male academics, according to a study by Lori Handrahan, Ph.D. More than half held leadership positions on campus. It’s perhaps significant that the findings come from an independent scholar, meaning she currently holds no faculty position. Here’s her report in the Journal of Human Trafficking with more. You can see a concise summary of her findings that she posted on Medium. And here’s the awesome […]

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Revisiting AIAW during March Madness

With the March Madness basketball tournaments in full swing, I can’t resist revisiting a fine article in the Washington Post about the NCAA’s dead sibling, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). This “Made by History” article is full of important women’s history. The NCAA used to manage men’s intercollegiate sports and the AIAW oversaw women’s sports. I often wonder what athletics would look like today if the NCAA hadn’t muscled the AIAW out of existence and took over its territory. While we’re at it, here’s an excerpt of my video interview with Margot Polivy, who was the legal […]

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Men get rehired, women get rejected

There’s a double standard in college sports that treats coaches differently depending on whether they discriminated under Title IX or were the ones discriminated against — men get rehired, and women get rejected for other top coaching jobs. But the latest example of that suggests that there may be a crack or even a tectonic shift in that double standard, perhaps due to Title IX activism of the past decade that fed into the #metoo movement. In the past week, Grambling (La.) State University hired Art Briles, the disgraced former football coach for Baylor University, to be offensive coordinator. Baylor […]

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Title IX cases highlight institutional betrayal

Big names in academia gave shameful public lessons recently on what institutional betrayal looks like. At Harvard University, 38 faculty members signed an open letter challenging the university’s decision to bar anthropologist John Comaroff from teaching or taking on new advisees after two investigations supported reports of his sexual and professional misconduct. The signers included famous academics and public figures. But then 73 Harvard faculty released a letter blasting their colleagues for rushing to defend the alleged abuser without knowing all the facts, thus publicly betraying student victims in a way that could pressure other victims not to report misconduct. After […]

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Transgender athletes caught between inclusion and competition

Today’s debates about transgender athletes competing in elite sports remind me of the early days of Title IX when feminists and everyone else in society were trying to figure out how to include women of any kind in school sports. What’s the fairest way? Some argued for not following “the male model” of athletics, with its long reputation for cheating, winning at all costs, and exploiting young athletes. Inclusion is more important than competition, they argued, favoring the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women’s slogan “every girl in a sport and a sport for every girl” so that all girls […]

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37 Words for 47 weeks

Tuesday, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, also was World Read Aloud Day and the second day of National Library Lovers Month. That’s a hodgepodge, I admit. But it’s perhaps a fitting way to introduce the first of a series of weekly blog posts honoring this 50th year of Title IX, the revolutionary law that prohibits sex discrimination in education and is the subject of my book 37 Words. If you haven’t already, subscribe to my blog “37 Words” and you’ll get a weekly note in your email inbox with a hodgepodge of my takes on a variety of […]

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Fresno’s robust Title IX history documented

I want to understand Title IX‘s history not only at elite East Coast universities and in the Washington, D.C. halls of power (where much of its story gets told) but in other settings too. When you think of Title IX’s 46-year-history, Fresno, Calif. may not be the first place to come to mind, yet its extensive and robust Title IX history illustrates the evolution of the law’s application and feminism in the U.S. heartland. Feminism shapes Title IX (and vice versa) in all corners of the United States, in all income brackets, and in diverse populations. I could have picked […]

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A closer look at Title IX in Fresno

I’m jazzed to announce that I’ll be speaking about Title IX history particularly in the context of Fresno, Calif. at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association on Saturday, August 4, at Santa Clara (Calif.) University. I’ll be part of a session entitled “Memories of Political and Cultural Protest” with two other speakers who will focus on campus protests in Paris in 1968 and campus anti-war activism in California’s Silicon Valley from 1965 to 1980. My talk ties the past to the present with the title, “Uppity Women, Nasty Women: From Title IX to […]

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Get ready for more Title IX fireworks

Happy 2018! In the new year, the backlash against Title IX will make more headlines as the Trump Administration continues to change regulations dealing with sex discrimination in education. Advocates for girls and women will push back and eventually move society two steps forward for every step back. We’ve seen this before, many times. Let’s take a look at the challenges that Title IX faced and overcame at this point in previous decades. It’s been a wild ride toward equity in education. The fun isn’t done. This timeline leaves out a lot, yet you can see patterns and progress: 1968 […]

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Men complain things to me

Writer Rebecca Solnit brilliantly described the commonplace phenomenon of mansplaining in her book Men Explain Things To Me. There’s a similar phenomenon — menplaining? dudespouting? — in which men co-opt women’s grievances to complain that they’re the victims of sexism when some advance in women’s rights constrains male advantages. Title IX‘s current battles and its history are full of menplaining in the courts. Male student athletes sued in the 1990s and 2000s. They complained of sex bias in the Title IX regulations  because they forced — forced! mind you — athletic directors to cut some men’s teams when budgets got tight. […]

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Happy birthday, Title IX! (from some of us)

Title IX is 45 years old this month! Imagine having your logic, your morality, and even your right to exist constantly being questioned for 45 years — essentially, what most women encounter in overt or subtle ways in our sexist society. You’d be tired of this nonsense by now, right? That’s what Title IX has faced since Congress passed it and President Nixon signed it on June 23, 1972. Fortunately, enough people understand the need to prohibit sex discrimination in education and have benefited from Title IX, giving this law the strength to persist. Compare the muscles and skills of today’s female […]

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Office for Civil Rights helped, hindered Title IX

Republican and Democratic Administrations have different track records for Office of Civil Rights enforcement of Title IX. (The OCR is part of the Executive Branch.) Three videos in this blog — with former OCR officials Martin Gerry, Cindy Brown, and Deborah Ashford — give a taste of that divide from the 1970s under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations. After Title IX became law in 1972, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) had to write regulations to implement the law. That’s standard procedure, usually accomplished in a matter of months for many laws, but the Nixon and Ford […]

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Equality game in overtime for coaches

I loved being the quarterback. I had a strong passing arm, a good eye for quickly reading the players on the field, and fast legs to sprint when I had to. My college football team didn’t play on the stadium field, since girls weren’t allowed to play intercollegiate football, but the intramural teams got us in the game. On Christmas break, back home my father seemed to listen with enthusiasm as I described the best plays from our games. He introduced me to football, after all, through weekend TV, teaching me to recognize a screen play or a defensive blitz. […]

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Lobbyists, Congressional staff influenced Title IX

[Videos feature Judy Norrell, former lobbyist for the League of Women Voters, and Barbara Dixon, former staff person for Sen. Birch Bayh.] Title IX wasn’t just an act of Congress, nor did it come simply from the demands of women’s activist organizations. There’s plenty of overlap between insiders and outsiders in Washington, D.C. and varying degrees of insider- or outsider-ness depending on the person and the situation. Women were small in number compared with men working in the nation’s capitol in the 1970s, which made it easier, in some ways, to find each other and collaborate as both insiders and outsiders. Female […]

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Legal muscle behind Title IX still flexing

The Chicago Public School District just got its sports programs schooled by a Hall of Famer. Not a sports star, mind you, but Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. (Video: Greenberger describes her reasons for pursuing legal justice for women.) Chicago has agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights resulting from a complaint filed by the Center in 2010 claiming that the city denies girls the sports opportunities it gives to boys. As a result, the District will have to create roughly 6,000 more opportunities for girls to engage in sports, affecting most of […]

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Uppity women changing UC Santa Barbara

A nearly 13-hour sit-in by female students and their supporters at the University of California, Santa Barbara produced promises of change from the administration, providing an example of how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go under Title IX. The sit-in happened just as I was watching the 1999 documentary A Hero for Daisy about a dramatic 1976 protest by female students at Yale University who stripped off their clothes in an administrator’s office to reveal “Title IX” or “IX” written in bold letters on their chests and backs. Their leader, Chris Ernst, then read a statement of grievances […]

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Women get smaller share of coaching since Title IX

Often when we think of Title IX we think of how this law opened up opportunities for millions of girls to play sports and be athletes. The numbers tell a different story for women who want to be coaches. The percentage of college women’s teams that are coached by women dropped by more than half (from 90% to 40%) while the proportion of women coaching men’s teams did not rise, according to the fine folks at the Title IX Blog who do such a good job of keeping us up to date on current events related to Title IX. Don’t blame […]

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