Thursday, January 08, 2009

Title IX Twist

Some good news from the Title IX fight!

Title IX is the federal law that states there must be equal access to sports for both male and females. The rule helped open the door for female sports such as soccer and basketball but has had a devastating effect on all other sports, especially male orientated ones. If there weren't enough girls in the same sport, the male sport was just shut down. Suddenly, sports such as diving, wrestling, and weight lifting became a no-go for funding because they couldn't attract females to them. Men lost out at a highly disproportionate rate: for each girl added to the sports field, and higher number of men were tossed from the university support.

From One News Now:
Illinois school gets creative, complies with Title IX


"Rather than simply defaulting to this sort of bean-counting mentality of proportionality where you say, you know, 55 percent of our student body is female, [so] that means 55 of our athletes must also be female, they are going for a much more flexible approach that I think will be great for other schools to look at," she contends. "And they are using comprehensive interest surveys, basically asking their student body, 'What sports are you capable of playing? What sports do you want to play?' And they are using that data with the department of education to show that they are in compliance under Title IX."

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