We hereby interrupt our cleaning the closet of old news to comment on something current. Or rather, a current comment on some of our collected, closeted stuff. In Saturday’s Washington Post feminist scribe Ellen Goodman, reprising the same National Women’s Law Center report discussed below, is at pains to deny that Title IX has anything to do with quotas. Only chauvinist critics could think such a thing. “No one has yet labeled the Mia Hamms of the world ‘quota queens,'” she writes, “but you get the idea.”
Indeed I do. In fact, if Ms. Goodman is correct, let me be the first: I don’t know what “the Mia Hamms of the world” believe, but it is perfectly clear that outspoken Title IX fans are indeed quota queens (or kings, as the case may be). Of course, Ms. Goodman is not correct. Critics of Title IX have been shouting quotas for years. (For a summary of the argument, with evidence, see Jessica Gavora’s new book, Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX, being published this month by Encounter Books in San Francisco.)
In fact, one of the things that makes the Title IX controversies so interesting is that they so clearly reveal the assumption — it has become virtual orthodoxy on the left — that disparities = discrimination, that fairness requires perfectly proportional representation. Thus, in publicizing its recent letter to thirty university presidents criticizing their unfair treatment of women athletes, the National Women’s Law Center asserted in a June 18 press release that “The athletic scholarship gap represents the difference between the percentage of female athletes and the percentage of scholarship dollars they receive.”
As the NWLC pointed out, the law — actually, the regulation adopted by the Dept. of Education during the Clinton administration — “requires the percentages of total athletic scholarship dollars awarded to male and female athletes to be within one percent, or one scholarship (whichever is greater), of their total athletic participation rates, absent any legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons.” And reasons that would impress NWLC as legitimate and nondiscriminatory have proved quite rare. It is hard to fault the conclusion about the requirement of strict proportionality reached in “Title IX at 30,” a June 21 analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education: “If a college had the same proportion of women among its athletes as it did among its students, then it would be presumed to be in compliance with Title IX. This made substantial proportionality a ‘safe harbor’ for athletics directors who didn’t want to be sued.”
Jessica Gavora gives a revealing example of how the Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has applied its policy, and presumably how groups such as NWLC would like to continue having it applied:
In the fall of 2000, having labored for a decade to attract women to its programs, the university [of Wisconsin] had achieved near-perfect parity in the spring of that year: 429 athletes on the campus were men and 425 were women. Not good enough, wrote Algis Tamosiunas, of the OCR’s Chicago office, in a letter to university officials. Because women constituted a majority of students on the Madison campus, or 53.1 percent, the university would have to add another 25 women.
Such letters have been routinely sent from the OCR to universities struggling to stay on the right side of the federal authorities. OCR officials such as Norma Cantu were being dishonest when they insisted that because the regulations didn’t “require” sex quotas, those who administered the regulations didn’t work relentlessly to make quotas happen.
Most of the recent controversy concerning Title IX has concerned whether it is responsible for the rash of men’s teams being eliminated across the country by colleges in their attempt to reach the goal of “gender equity.” Much more significant, and interesting, in my opinion, is what this controversy reveals about the rampant confusion over the core meanings of fairness, equality, and discrimination.
If it violated federal anti-discrimination policy for the University of Wisconsin to have 429 male athletes compared to only 425 women when 53.1% of the students were women, why is the “underrepresentation” of men, the male student gap, at Wisconsin and elsewhere not an even more egregious violation?
Indeed, many universities, including Division I athletic powerhouses, have a larger male student gap than athletic scholarship gap. According to data compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education, “women account for 41.8 percent of Division I athletes, and receive 43.7 percent of scholarship funds,” and in 2000-2001 they made up 53% of the students at the 321 Division I colleges.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, a number of public universities have attempted to to combat this male student “underrepresentation” by providing admissions preferences to men. (“Admissions Officers Walk a Fine Line in Gender-Balancing Act,” 22 May 2001.) Should admissions offices be forced to adhere to the same strict “substantial proportionality” standard as athletic departments? If they were, would the ensuing gender-conscious admissions constitute sex discrimination?
UPDATE – The Chronicle of Higher Education, in its issue dated June 28, reports on the gender gap (link requires registration) in community and four year colleges. Enrollment in community colleges nationwide is 42% male and 58% female. Graduation rates are skewed even more: 39% male v. 61% female. According to the Chronicle, “151 women receive an associate degree for every 100 men…. Four-year colleges and universities tend to be split roughly 55-45 in favor of women. One hundred and thirty-three women receive a bachelor’s degree for every 100 men.”
These gender gaps are much more substantial than what the National Womens Law Center has even alleged regarding female underrepresentation in college athletics. Should there be a National Mens Law Center claiming sexism and discrimination in all of American higher education? Wouldn’t it make more sense to return to an understanding of discrimination that requires at least a modicum of intent and thus to abandon the assumption that disparities = discrimination? (Answer: yes.)
