Girls Are Icky

In women’s war against the attempted shove backwards into the days of yore being legislatively coordinated by George Bush and pals, the newest frontier of the battle is Title IX—the landmark 1972 law prohibiting gender discrimination in any education program or school activity that receives federal funds, which led to fuller participation by girls in the classroom and on the playing field. From yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

One step forward, one step backward. Push and push back. It is ever thus in the struggle for human rights, in which progress, if any, is usually measured in millimeters.

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[T]he Bush administration, without one public hearing, stealthily hacked away at Title IX with new guidelines that say colleges can comply by merely sending out e-mail surveys asking female students if they are interested in playing sports.

If there is little or no response, a school is free not to provide those sports opportunities. This change now trumps the three-way compliance test previously in force.

Under that test, compliance could be achieved by showing the percentage of female athletes was proportionate to female enrollment, the school had a pattern of expanding opportunities for women, or proving that the sports interests of women had been "fully and effectively" accommodated.

E-mail replies, or rather the lack of them, are going to determine whether women are granted access to a team in any given sport! A low response can be interpreted as no interest, and therefore no need, to provide equipment and access to gyms for women.

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It is a pathetic excuse to evade the purpose of the law. The Department of Education has created a new loophole through which schools may return to the bad old days of denying women and girls an equal opportunity to participate in team sports. Decisions about who gets to play what sports are now in the hands of telemarketing techniques.

On a side note, this certainly seems to be a class issue as well; not every student has a personal computer which makes e-mail readily accessible at all times. In other words, the poorer you are, the less likely you are to receive and respond to the e-mail in time.

In what I feel can safely be classified as “not shocking,” Democrats and Republicans have vastly divergent reactions to Title IX.

Former Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., the author of Title IX, was outraged. "Sports is all about advancing the ball, but the Department of Education has thrown women's athletics to the back court," he said.

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Generally, Title IX has worked -- other schools have largely addressed most unfairness issues. Millions of girls not only get the desired exercise but win valuable scholarships too. But conservatives such as House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a former wrestling coach, complained that to make room for women's programs some schools have killed minor male sports.

Two years ago, the Bush administration created a special commission to review the law and its social implications, stacked with Title IX opponents. But the administration underestimated the popularity of Title IX not just with girls but their daddies and mommies and the panel buckled under public pressure to protect the law.

The group could not come up with a consensus, although one recommendation was the one the administration has now sneakily adopted -- that compliance could be met simply by surveying students to determine their interests.

It's no coincidence the administration waited until after the election to pull the plug on women's sports.

It is well documented (plug any combination of girls, sports, and self esteem into your search engine of choice) that girls, on average, suffer greater losses of self esteem during adolescence than boys, but girls who are involved in sports have less trouble struggling with self esteem issues than girls who don’t. (The same is true of boys who are involved in sports.) This makes it imperative to make sports available and accessible to girls—as opposed to attempts to undermine girls’ participation so as to reserve greater funding for boys.

I understand Hastert’s frustration that there are schools who may need to cut a boys’ sport with less interest (say, lacrosse) to make room for a girls’ sport with greater interest (say, basketball), but his ire is misplaced. Neither the boys’ lacrosse team nor the girls’ basketball team should have to suffer. If he’s concerned about school funding, he would do well to look to his party’s continued tax cuts for the wealthy and pork barrel spending during wartime, ballooning state deficits, and his president’s unfunded education mandate, which puts an increased financial burden on schools. Women’s interests have been sacrificed enough in deference to men’s success. If the boys’ lacrosse team is getting left behind, it isn’t up to the girls’ basketball team to save them.