The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (link requires subscription) this morning that “how colleges measure gender equity in sports could change drastically” if the Dept. of Education “adopts any of the recommendations discussed by an advisory panel” that met in Philadelphia yesterday. The current standards, such as they are, are described, along with all the proposed changes.
The current standard that has caused the most trouble requires colleges to have roughly the same proportion of female student athletes as there are women undergraduates. It is this “substantial proportionality” standard that has led many colleges to curtail or even eliminate male teams, and it very nicely highlights the fine line (is that a mixed metaphor?) separating anti-discrimination measures from an occasionally coercive social engineering.
The “substantial proportionality” standard only makes sense as an anti-discrimination measure if it is based on the assumption that male and female college students are equally interested in athletics. But if they are not equally interested, then clearly the effect — and quite possibly the intent — of that standard is not to fight discrimination but affirmatively to promote greater female participation in sports. That may be a worthy goal, but it is not an anti-discrimination goal.
“Not so fast!” say defenders of Title IX. “Interests don’t occur in a vacuum.” Indeed, as a real live (and articulate) defender of Title IX argued in a blogdebate we carried on last summer (see here for this slice of it),
[d]ifferences in funding and sports programs don’t simply materialize through the application of neutral criteria; they are the result of specific choices by school sports administrators.
This is true, I replied,
and a very good point, although I think it is mistaken to the degree that it implies that men and women have equivalent interests in sports and that the disparities in participation can be explained primarily by the biased decisions of administrators. This view reminds me of an argument I heard quite often from friends (or former friends) during my work with the law firm defending Sears Roebuck in the sex discrimination suit brought against it by the EEOC. It was no defense of Sears, they would claim, that men are more interested in and available for installing heating and air conditioning systems, home appliances, etc. If Sears only chose to sell different products, my friends argued, it could get more women employees. (I commented on Title IX earlier here, here, and here.)
Well, yes, it could. But should the government force it do so, or force colleges to enforce equal interest in athletics where it does not now exist, under the protective coloring of ending discrimination? Our society may well be better off with more women soccer players and air conditioner installers, but it is not at all clear that their “underrepresentation” in those fields is a result of discrimination. If it is, then the women of Alabama are discriminating against themselves. (If this reference is opaque, see here.)
One of the reasons the anti-discrimination principle is in danger of collapse is the weight of the load it is being forced to carry.
I went to Princeton at a time that alumni complaints about coeducation were still a regular feature of the class notes. I remember one elderly alumnus recanting of his opposition when (1) his granddaughter enrolled (this possibility appeared never to have occurred to him, and I am not joking) and (2) her athletic team had a league-winning season.
I’d be more inclined to agree that the Procrustean rule in question is stupid, except that, having lived through it, I think that the boom in women’s athletics was in fact driven more by Title IX than the other way around. In just a few years, woman-athletes went from freaks to normal. Participation in women’s athletics skyrocketed. There seems to have been a real “seeding” or “critical mass” effect. Like the old alumnus, we never seem to have considered the possiblity before.
(Having said that, I think the percentage rule is too drastic; indeed, now that women grace Wheaties boxes regularly it might be time for a sunset provision. Every once in a while we leftists ought to proclaim victory and move on to something else!)
Andrew – My point is not that the “substantial proportionality” rule doesn’t work, nor that “working,” i.e., producing more female athletes, is a bad thing. My point is that it should not be seen as an anti-discrimination measure and thus reveals that at least some measures taken in the name of opposing discrimination are really social engineering.
Now, social engineering itself is not necessarily bad. We do it all the time – through legislation, the tax code, etc. But truth in packaging, I think, requires that when we do this we do it openly and not under the guise of fighting discrimination. Once discrimination is unmoored from its conceptual roots and encouraged to stray far from its natural domain — removing arbitrary obstacles of race, sex, religion that prevent individuals from achieving their goals — and is enlisted in the quest to cure other social ills and/or promote other social goods (more female soccer players) we wind up in the conceptual and political mess we’re now in.