Myth No. 4: Schools must spend equally on men's and women's sportsRead the whole thing here.
There is nothing in the language of Title IX that demands equal spending. And few athletic departments spend equally. Almost universally, they spend more on men's programs. A Women's Sports Foundation study found female college athletes received only 35 percent of total athletic expenditures as recently as the 2004-05 school year.
The law allows for a school to spend differently on sports, but those differences can't be discriminatory. If a college has football, men's lacrosse and baseball, those sports are much more expensive to run and outfit. "And that's OK, because there are reasonable differences in sports," Morrison says. "But if you're outfitting your women's programs in substandard equipment, that would not be OK."
The truth is that women's sports still has a small piece of the pie. The NCAA Division I Athletics Programs Report (pdf) contains detailed financial information for all Division I schools; on Page 23, it shows that in 2010, FBS Division I schools spent a median amount of $20,416,000 on men's programs and $8,006,000 on women's.
[H/T to Shaker LucyChi.]
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