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 considering that the data on K-12 are far from user-friendly. Colleges and universities are required by law to report their athletics data each year, which can be found easily online. Not so for high schools. But there are other, more labor-intensive ways to get at the data. And that’s what Champion Women did.

Are you wondering if your high school offers girls and boys equitable opportunities to play sports? Search for the school’s name here and find out. In my local area, for example, two of the three high schools fail the fairness test when it comes to school sports for girls and boys. Shame on Lebanon High School and Hanover High School, both in New Hampshire. Kudos to Hartford (Vt.) High School for its equitable athletics program. Of course, playing opportunities are only one aspect of discrimination; unequal resources and funding for girls or boys teams are common too, but not the subject of this new analysis.

Elsewhere

Two scathing independent reports found “pervasive toxic behavior” and failures in handling complaints of sexual misconduct on all 23 campuses of the California State University system. Read an excerpt for each campus from the report to get a sense of the scope.

It seems only fitting to close with an item that combines athletics with sexual misconduct. Systemic hazing, sexual abuse, and racism in the athletics department at Northwestern University finally led to the football coach’s firing. Students are suing. Advocates are calling for Congress to pass the “College Athletes Bill of Rights” so that school administrators and the NCAA aren’t the only ones responding to (or ignoring, as the case may be) this kind of misconduct. Because too often, all they do is try to protect their reputations.

(Caption for photo: The “father” of Title IX, Sen. Birch Bayh, jogs with students.)