Reducing opportunities in the name of gender balance

Katherine Kersten
Star Tribune
September 30, 2002

At a recent hearing in Atlanta, Bob Groseth -- Northwestern University's swimming coach -- described an incident that occurred a few years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Shortly before their team's first meet, several of Whitewater's female swimmers quit because practices were so demanding. Ironically, said Groseth, the women's decision created a serious problem for Whitewater's men's swimming team. The reason? Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.

Like many colleges today, Whitewater tries to comply with Title IX by keeping its ratio of male to female athletes equal to the gender balance of its enrollment as a whole. (This is called the "proportionality" test: If 55 percent of students are female, approximately 55 percent of athletes must also be female.) So when the female swimmers quit, administrators had little choice. They told the swimming coach that an equal number of male swimmers would have to go as well.

Both the male and female swimmers were devastated. To save the men, the women hammered out a compromise. They agreed to lower standards for the reluctant female swimmers to get them to stay. In other words, they undermined their own team's competitiveness so their brother athletes could continue swimming.

Welcome to the brave new world of Title IX. Title IX was passed to ensure equal educational opportunity for both sexes, and it specifically bars quotas. Yet in recent years, the Department of Education has used a gender quota -- the proportionality test -- to measure compliance with the law. Today, proportionality is the only "safe harbor" for schools that hope to avoid a costly Title IX investigation or lawsuit.

Not surprisingly, the proportionality test has created a nightmare for college administrators. The problem is this: Today, 57 percent of the nation's college students are female and only 43 percent are male. While thousands of women want to play sports, women -- as a group -- appear to have significantly less interest in competitive collegiate athletics than men do.

Evidence of this abounds. For example, on the interest survey of the SAT college entrance exam, three times more males than females indicate an interest in college sports. Collegiate intramural sports, which are wholly interest-driven, are about 78 percent male and 22 percent female. Most college coaches say they have to recruit women more heavily than men, and offer them bigger scholarships to get them to play. A typical liberal arts college might struggle to get 18 women out for its softball team, while 45 men line up for a spot on the baseball team.

Under these circumstances, most colleges must engage in tortured social engineering to achieve gender proportionality. Some have added sports like women's crew. (While there is little demand for crew, its large rosters of 50-80 help balance a football team.) Many schools, however, have found that it's easier to achieve proportionality by cutting men's teams -- often without adding any new opportunities for women.

Since 1992, American colleges have dropped about 400 men's teams and tens of thousands of male athletes. Casualties include legendary programs like UCLA's men's swimming team, which produced 22 Olympic medals. Gymnastics and wrestling have also been decimated. In some cases, like that of Marquette's wrestling team, alumni offered to pay all the threatened team's costs. Nevertheless, the program was dropped to achieve gender balance.

Today, women who want to be college athletes have significantly more opportunities than men do. In 2001, the NCAA had about 580 more women's teams than men's teams, and in most sports, women's teams were entitled to more scholarships. Men's opportunities, on the other hand, have shrunk. In 1985, there were 253 male athletes per NCAA campus. In 2001, there were only 199.

Colleges that don't wish to cut men's teams have found a less visible way to achieve proportionality: They practice rigorous "roster management." These schools cap participation on men's teams, often at levels well below what a competitive program requires. They also prohibit male walk-ons, thus withholding the chance to participate from athletes who cost the school next to nothing and play only for the love of the game. At some schools, men's coaches don't know how many team members they can have until they see how many women sign up.

Advocates of proportionality often claim that football -- not Title IX quotas -- is to blame for recent losses in men's teams and opportunities. But at many large schools, football is the goose that laid the golden egg -- it helps finance women's sports. Two recent studies show that women's sports are strongest at schools where football makes money.

Today, high school girls get better grades, on average, than boys. They also outnumber boys in extracurricular activities ranging from orchestra to yearbook. There's only one area, college sports, where gender imbalance is presumed -- as a matter of policy and with no further proof -- to be the result of intentional discrimination. It's time to correct this injustice.

-Katherine Kersten is a senior fellow of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.