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And Now They Tell Us Women Don't Really Like Sports?
Reprinted in-part Courtesy of Mariah Nelson, with segments written & edited by FEMALES.US Editor.

"The very fact that they must praise it before they kill it is a testament to the popularity of women's sports," says Eleanor Smeal, president of the U.S. Feminist Majority Foundation. "They can't oppose it on academic grounds, either-there are too many female doctors and women lawyers. They can't win in the US Courts. They've tried that and lost. So their only chance is to change the regulations."

And that's the new wrinkle. In the past, athletic directors tried unsuccessfully to protect male entitlement by defending their schools against legal challenges brought under Title IX. The new tactic is to go after the Education Department itself for its guidelines for complying with the law.

The 3 current objections are:

ARE MEN NOW BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST?

According to the National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA), 350 such programs have been cut since the passage of Title IX. Last January, the NWCA, joined by the College Sports Council and others, filed a lawsuit, charging the U.S. Education Department's Office of Civil Rights has enforced Tide IX in a way that constitutes discrimination against men in lower-profile sports. The US Department of Education has moved to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that the court does not have jurisdiction to consider the case; nonetheless, it is preparing a review of its Title IX guidelines.

Aware of the program cuts, House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert, a Republican and former high school athletics coach who has publicly bemoaned the 11 "unintended consequence" of Title IX (the elimination of men's programs), had called for a General Accounting Office investigation. The GAO report showed that in a reason collegiate sport season, 162,783 women and 231,866 men were playing college sports. While some men's programs had been cut, others were being added, resulting in a net gain of 36 men's teams between since 1982, not a loss. Overall, male sports participation is increasing, not decreasing.

Also, in the 20-year span thru the 1980's and 1990's, for every 2 U.S. Female sports opportunities added for women, 1.5 were added for men (82,000 were added for women; 52,735 for men). There were 156,131 men playing college sports in 1981, about the same as the number of female athletes today. So if men's sports opportunities had been held steady while bringing females up-to-speed, universities would not now be in the position of robbing Peter to play Paula, so to speak.

Schools have to make tough financial choices. In the 1970s, most college enrollment was 65 percent male. Today women students are in the majority, at about 54 percent. When colleges aren't able to raise additional revenue to fund the new women's sport programs that they need either to balance growth in men's sports or to satisfy increased demand from female students, then they are forced to borrow from other line items in the budget.

The obvious fat to trim would be football-especially in big schools at Division 1-A level, with 85 football scholarships and vast coaching staffs with salaries that can exceed those of university presidents. (To put that number in context, National Football League teams carry only 53 active players), more than 80% of athletic directors are men, and many are former football coaches. So to save the sacred bull of football, athletic directors look for other sources of money-and sometimes do cut wrestling to pay for field hockey.

WHAT ABOUT 'THE QUOTA THING'?

Does Title IX constitute a quota? All eight federal courts that ruled on Title IX in the past 20 years have agreed: No. Nancy Hogshead, a 1984 Olympic swimming champion, assistant law professor, and founder and chair of the Florida Coastal School of Law Legal Advocacy Center for Women in Sports, explains that the guidelines for interpreting Title IX "give schools broad flexibility to choose between three wholly independent ways to show that they provide non-discriminatory sports participation opportunities.

"Schools can either show that the athletic department's gender mix matches its general student body population, or that the institution has a history and continuing practice of expansion for women's athletics, or that it is meeting the interests and abilities of the female athletes on campus,

COULD IT BE WOMEN DON'T REALLY WANT TO PLAY SPORTS?

It is that third part of what's known as the "three-part test"-the "interests and abilities" phrase-that seems to render Title IX most vulnerable. When all else fails, Title IX opponents claim that women don't really care much about sports anyway. In several lawsuits, schools have tried unsuccessfully to contend that the athletic "interests and abilities" of their female students are already being met-with proportionally fewer opportunities than male students are receiving.

Females Website Editor's Note: Could it be girls are too busy with friends and dating to play sports, including popular Virtual Service dating?

The new commission may be pursuing this same line of reasoning. The Education Department's Web site offers an informational Q&A that includes this apparently frequently asked question: "Isn't this commission just a way for the Administration to roll back the rights of female athletes because a few men are complaining their athletic programs have been cut?"

The answer they post on the site hints at a possible outcome: "No. For at least a decade, schools have requested additional guidance on how to assess the interest and abilities of their students. The Commission may choose to identify, among other things, methods that can be used to assess the interest and abilities of students. The Department seeks an approach that allows schools to structure their athletics programs to meet the needs and goals of the school and its students, in a nondiscriminatory manner consistent with the requirements of Title IX."

These "methods used to assess the interests and abilities of students" would probably consist of a survey instrument "that would take us back to the dark ages," according to Donna Lopiano, a Hall of Fame softball player and executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation. "It's like saying we should survey how interested females are in math-then limit their opportunities according to the survey. It's just crazy," Lopiano says. "Besides, there are less than 400,000 participation slots in college altogether. How can they possibly meet the interests and abilities of the six million high school girls and boys who might want to play college sports? To claim that they're already doing so is ludicrous."

"Women aren't very athletic" is an antique argument, frayed from centuries of use, so I was surprised to hear Jessica Gavora make it. She's a former high school basketball player who says she learned through basketball how to work hard, how to handle success and failure, how to be a team player, and how to cherish physical fitness. I would not have been happy in a world that forced me to be a dancer or a cheerleader when I really wanted to play basketball," she acknowledges.

Yet in her recent book, Tilting the Playing Fields: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX, Gavora calls Title IX a quota and claims it discriminates against boys and men. A senior policy advisor for the U.S. Department of justice and also Attorney General John Ashcroft's chief speech writer, Gavora cites Brown University's research to make her case. While spending millions of dollars unsuccessfully defending itself against a suit brought by its female students, Brown presented surveys showing that the ratio of female to male varsity athletes at Brown-40 to 60 percent matched the interest levels among female and male Brown students.

The US Judge who ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in 1991 rejected the university's claim that Brown's female students care less about sports, also rejecting Brown's claims that Title IX constituted a sex quota and that implementing Title IX would require a drastic reduction of the men's program. The Supreme Court let the lower court's decision stand.

"We need an end to the recent rhetoric that implies that equality for women results in the destruction of men's sports and that female athletes aren't as interested in playing sports as their male counterparts," says pioneering women's sports activist and tennis champion Billie Jean King. "These are anachronistic and stereotypical views that are contrary to reality."

BEHIND THE RESISTANCE: THE ULTIMATE ARGUMENT!

Why are we still arguing about this? Why is there no end in sight to a 30 year-long debate over whether women should have equal opportunities on America's playing fields? Because sports are not just sports. Sports are a battle, men often say. Sports are not a battle, but they are not simply fun and games, either. The more women play sports, the healthier and stronger they become. Physical fitness improves self-esteem and mood, lowers anxiety and depression, reduces stress. Women who play sports are less likely to suffer from breast cancer, osteoporosis, heart failure. High school athletes have lower rates of drug use and pregnancy. They feel better about their bodies.

Sports radically transform women emotionally, as well. The more females play sports, the more they respect themselves, stand up for themselves, team up with other women, and perhaps also refuse to tolerate abuse, whether that's sexual harassment at work or battering at home. The more women gain physical and emotional strength, the less feasible it is for men to treat females as inferior.

And maybe it's this-the growing strength, confidence, and team-work among women, and the shifting balance of power between women and men-that makes Title IX an emotional issue, and upsets some people even more than the loss of a few sports programs. When I was on tour for my book, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, I kept hearing the word "different." During arguments about female power, potential, and purpose, after I "won" with statistics, facts, and reason, my opponents would resort to, "But men and women are different!"

Having heard this literally hundreds of times, in innumerable variations involving brains, muscles, height, weight, genitals, nurturance, combativeness, and other real and imagined physical and psychological differences, I have concluded that this is the emotional core of the opposition to Title IX, and to women's growing physical and political strength.

Title IX opponents want men and women to be fundamentally, essentially different from each other. They want men to be stronger. To be more privileged. To be on top.

Feminism challenges that assumption-saying, in effect: sure there are a few differences, but we can all be doctors, nurses, pilots, presidents, soccer players, synchronized swimmers, and soldiers, with the full range of emotions and behaviors to choose from. We need not restrict ourselves to gender-stereotyped games.

I think this perspective scares some people. What if girls and females did not need to dress, talk, work, parent, and play sports "like women"? What if they could behave any way they pleased? What if men could?

ANTICIPATING THE COA REPORT!

The commission has issued its report on the investigations into Title IX to Secretary Paige, who "will review the recommendations of the commission very carefully before making any decisions on how to proceed," according to the United States Department of Education website. True, at least one man on the commission is a former wrestler, yet with female sports advocates Donna de Varona and Julie Foudy there also, it's impossible to conceive of a unanimous proposal that would hurt women's sports. But the commission is only making recommendations, not decisions.

Could the George Bush Administration rewrite regulations based on an assertion that women don't really care about sports as much as men do? That is always possible!

What's the worst that could happen? "Everything that we've worked for could be over," says Hogshead, the female swimmer and lawyer. "They could tell schools that it's O.K. to give girls and women fewer opportunities because they're less interested in sports."

PAST CREDIT DISCIMINATION AGAINST FEMALES HAS BEEN BLATANT! The above was mostly written by Mariah Nelson. Content below was written by The Editor of Females.us website.

Old customs and practices die hard and could even send us back to the "women's gym." Perhaps go back even to the old credit discrimination quota (common as recently as the 1970's) when females were often victims of amazing (by today's standards) credit discrimination bias.

Blatant credit application discrimination (based on sex), when applying for credit cards, auto loans or home mortgage loans caused many females to hesitate buying a car by completing their personal financial statement, or purchasing real estate properties by completing a mortgage loan application due to disgraceful sex discrimination when banks and other lenders went to approve a woman's loan application for credit!

And Now They Tell Us Women Don't Really Like Sports? Reprinted in-part Courtesy of Mariah Nelson, with segments written & edited by FEMALES.US Editor.