Title IX News

Sunday’s World Cup victory for the U.S. women’s national soccer team was entirely due to the hard work and talent of the players on the field. But long before they were born, civil rights advocates and legislators were hard at work clearing their path to success.

Passed by Congress nearly 50 years ago, Title IX prohibited educational institutions receiving federal funding from discrimination based on gender. The legislation ensured the right of students to learn in an environment free from sexual harassment, and guaranteed pregnant and parenting teens breastfeeding accommodations. But the best-known feature of Title IX was its requirement of equal athletic opportunities for girls and boys.

This was a novel concept in the 1970s, and it did not go unchallenged. Lawsuits were filed by the NCAA and others demanding exemptions from the athletic provision. Their arguments hinged on an assumption that girls were not as interested in sports as boys, so schools should not be required to hire coaches to serve them or provide equal practice space. But judges determined — and history has shown — that the argument was simply untrue. When sports are made available to girls, they embrace them. The year Title IX was passed, there were 700 girls playing soccer on high school teams, according to a participation survey of the National Federation of High School Assns.; today, there are 390,000.

At roughly the same time the U.S. was passing Title IX, women’s rights movements around the world were succeeding in lifting bans on women’s soccer leagues. Several countries — including England, Brazil and Germany — had barred women from the sport on the premise that playing soccer could damage their ability to bear children. While eliminating the prohibitions was a step forward, this alone was not enough to generate an influx of young athletes; the sport was technically allowed but with limited investment, participation was anemic.

The U.S. took a different tack, and it reverberates in the world of women’s soccer today. Title IX didn’t merely allow women to play; it required opportunities be made available to them.

And the players poured in.

Between the year Title IX was passed (1972) and the first Women’s World Cup (1991), the sport saw a 17,000% increase in U.S. girls playing on high school soccer teams, according to the National Federation of High School Assns.

Some of these girls have grown up to be among the finest athletes in the world, and they are now in position to demand another kind of gender parity: pay equality.

Twenty-eight members of the U.S. Women’s National Team have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation alleging they are paid less than their male counterparts, despite doing the same work (and despite their impressive record of four World Cup championships and four Olympic gold medals).

Read the full text of this article, originally published by the Los Angeles Times.

During the Obama Administration, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights warned colleges and universities that, if they did not take further measures to prevent and remedy sexual violence among students, they could lose their federal funding. In a “Dear Colleague” letter sent in 2011 to more than seven thousand schools, the O.C.R. provided guidance on how to avoid such a punishment. Although the letter was not legally binding, and contained few very clear instructions, the agency posted a shame list of schools that were under investigation for noncompliance with Title IX, the law, passed in 1972, that prohibits sex discrimination at federally funded institutions. At a gathering of college administrators at Dartmouth, in 2014, the assistant secretary for civil rights, Catherine Lhamon, said, “Do not think it’s an empty threat.”

Universities reacted with panicked overcompliance: in renewing their attention to the rights of alleged victims of sexual assault, many began to disregard the rights of accused students. In recent years, it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses. At many schools, including Middlebury College and the University of Pennsylvania, investigators and adjudicators have been trained to “start by believing” the complainant rather than to start from a position of neutrality. According to K. C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on Title IX lawsuits, more than four hundred students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011 have sued their schools under federal or state laws—in many cases, for sex discrimination under Title IX. While many of the lawsuits are still ongoing, nearly half of the students who have sued have won favorable court rulings or have settled with the schools.

From the start, the Trump Administration seized on Title IX as an area in which to reverse the Obama Administration’s positions. Under Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education has rescinded more than twenty Obama-era policy guidelines on anti-discrimination laws, including ones that protected transgender students from discrimination and allowed them to use gender-segregated facilities of their choice. It has also cancelled policies that supported schools’ use of affirmative action, outlined disabled students’ rights, and attempted to curb racial disparities in elementary and secondary schools, based on research showing that minority students are punished for misconduct at higher rates than their behavior warrants. These revocations have rightly provoked concern that DeVos is turning her back on vulnerable students.

Read the full text of this article, originally published by the New Yorker.

Dr. Bernice Sandler, known as the “godmother of Title IX” for her work advocating for women’s and girls rights in education, died over the weekend at the age of 90. The Washington Post published her obituary Monday.

Sandler first embarked on a decades-long campaign against sex discrimination in academia in 1969. It led to the 1972 passage of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.

For her life’s work, Sandler was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, in 2013.

Title IX was passed with students and women in the collegiate environment in mind, though it is most widely used to open up opportunities and equal treatment for female student-athletes.

Sandler Changes College Culture

Sandler was met with what’s now termed sex discrimination when she applied for seven different teaching positions at the University of Maryland. She had a doctorate from the school in psychology and counseling but was not considered. Nor was she considered for future positions.

It was three words from hiring managers, Sandler said in a 1994 interview, that changed the paths of Sandler and millions of women after her:

“I don’t think I would have noticed if they’d said you come on too strong,” she said. The problem was that phrase “too strong for a woman.”

There was no federal law prohibiting discrimination against women in education, but Sandler found there was an executive order by President Lyndon B. Johnson that prohibited it by organizations with federal contracts. That included public universities and gave Sandler a “Eureka moment,” the Washington Post recounted.

She joined the Women’s Equity Action League, formed the one-woman “Federal Action Contract Compliance Committee,” and challenged 250 institutions while coordinating a massive letter-writing campaign. She then worked for a House subcommittee and the Health, Education and Welfare Department.

Title IX was passed on June 23, 1972 because of her work, and is most widely used in reference to equality in collegiate sports for both men and women.

Read the full text of this article, originally published by the Huffington Post.