Chevy Chase
High School
of Title IX
Hockey
Sports
Illustrated
For Women
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Despite the length that women have to go to reach the cultural prestige given to male athletes, the strides that women athletes have taken in the past 27 years have been remarkable. High school participation has increased four-fold and now 2.4 million girls are involved in sports compared to almost 300,000 in 1970. Male participation has increased, as well since Title IX and it is the intention of the legislation to create gender equality without ignoring the needs of boys and men. There have been considerable complaints raised that Title IX has taken away from male athletics with the elimination of some sports and a decreased budget in others. At the same time, though, it is clear that school budgets consistently distribute a disproportionate amount of money to finance women's sports. There were numerous attempts to curtail the efforts of Title IX and in 1974, an amendment to exempt revenue producing sports from Title IX was rejected. Other bills to alter the athletic coverage and enforcement of Title IX followed in 1975 and 1977 but the original intention of the amendment remained in tact. President Ford signed the final Title IX regulation establishing a three year period to comply, but few complaints were ever seriously investigated and strict enforcement of Title IX has been limited.
Despite continued unwillingness of schools to comply with Title IX, OCR has done little to enforce gender equity. Instead, many individuals have faced the challenges of filing lawsuits against educational institutions on their own. In 1984, the Supreme Court drastically negated the efforts of Title IX in Grove City v. Bell. The court ruled that Title IX did not cover entire educational institutions- only the programs receiving direct federal funds. Programs that did not receive direct assistance, such as athletics, were allowed to discriminate freely on the basis of sex. Women did not ignore this set back and were only prompted to work harder to influence Congress to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988. The act outlawed sex discrimination throughout an entire institution if any part of the institution received federal funding. The act nullified the ruling of Grove City v. Bell and a renewed commitment by OCR was made to end gender discrimination. The Supreme Court furthered the progress of Title IX when it ruled in favor of awarding monetary damages in sex discrimination cases. Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992) finally put real teeth into Title IX stating that compensatory and punitive damages were indeed available under the amendment. The most recent and influential pieces of legislation passed involving Title IX was the 1994 amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The act requires colleges and universities to disclose reports on expenditures and participation rates that are broken down by gender. The amendment did not go into effect until 1996, but has contributed greatly in women's fight for gender equity in athletics. |
Copyright Molly Egan, Jason Wood; Lehigh University 1999