(NY Times on Title IX) At Two-Year Colleges, Less Scrutiny Equals Less Athletic Equality

[alp227]

Los Angeles Southwest College has a new athletic field house and football stadium, but almost no female athletes.

Women make up more than two-thirds of students at this community college in the city’s South Central neighborhood, but less than a quarter of its athletes. The college’s decision to suspend the track team this year left women who wanted to play a sport with a single option: basketball.

Henry Washington, the college’s athletic director and head football coach, acknowledges that his program is most likely violating federal law by failing to offer enough roster spots to women. But he said many of the female students are also juggling jobs and child care, and do not have time to play sports.

(...)

Pensacola State College in Florida has suffered through its share of budget cuts, and athletic officials have long faced the thorny question of how much interest there is at a college that devotes an entire campus to health sciences programs, where students tend to be older, overwhelmingly female and, supposedly, less eager to play sports.

But there is no shortage of women playing sports at Pensacola. The college invests about $1 million a year in the athletics program, and coaches scour the state and beyond for talented female players. The women’s basketball team won the state championship this year.

(...)

The situation at Los Angeles Southwest, without question, more closely represents the norm among community colleges around the country. Even as they play an increasingly vital role in American higher education — enrolling more than eight million students nationwide last fall, a 20 percent jump since the fall of 2007, just before the start of the recession — community colleges are routinely failing to provide enough athletic opportunities to women, as required under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education. Many community colleges offer an array of options for men but just a single team for women. And dozens of colleges over the years had no women on their athletic rosters, according to federal education statistics.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/sports/at-two-year-colleges-less-scrutiny-equals-less-athletic-equality.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Title IX may be well-intentioned, but is it time to reform it?

[murielm99]

1. No it is not time to reform it.

Actually, this is part of the 1964 civil rights legislation. These are the 1972 educational amendments to that legislation.

Originally, Title IX was used to sue for the rights of a female professor who had been denied tenure because she came on too strong "for a woman."

Women would be discriminated against even more in all areas of education if we did anything to Title IX. It is about more than sports programs.