How has Title IX evolved?

Although Title IX is now associated with its impact on female athletics in educational arenas, the woman who spurred the law's passage had a different agenda. Molly and Cristen examine Title IX's origins, present and controversial future in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. Hey look this podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen weird confession. Sometimes

(00:22):
I forget people's birthday on purpose, So forget like in
quotation marks, just because I like sending belated birthday cards
better than regular birthday cards. Why because, like, when I'm
looking for a birthday card in the store, all the
ones I'll read for a regular birthday, which is not
funny to me, But then I'll read the belated ones
and I think that they're funny somehow. They're just funnier

(00:44):
than regular cards to me. Well, I handmake all of
my cards, Molly, so I don't. I don't really have
that issue. Of course you don't, Kristen. You have none
of my issues but a whole pack of your own,
so I don't need to quibble. Um. But the reason
I brought up belated birthday cards is because we have
a little bit of a belated birthday to celebrate. Yes.

(01:05):
On a June twenty three, nineteen seventy two, Title nine
was born our little bundle of joy. That's when it
was passed by Congress. A few days later. We missed
this birthday to July one. It was signed by President
Richard Nixon into law. Yeah, it was. It was. It
came out of Congress's womb and was thanked into life

(01:27):
by President Richard Nixon. But it wasn't really until a
few years later, much like a child, that it really
got legs and started walking around. It's true, you're going
to carry this metaphorum for a while as long as possible. Well,
let me, um, let me reach what the birth announcement
said to borrow your your metaphor. I love this and
but that I mean, let me read you the text
of the law. Okay. It says, no person in the

(01:49):
United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded
from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be
subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity. We
see eating federal financial assistance. M Now, one thing that
I don't hear in that LA Molly is anything dealing

(02:10):
with sports or athletes. That's right, but that's what we
associate with most Now. I think, yes, Title nine is
responsible for getting a lot more girls and women involved
in school athletics. But the main driver behind Title nine
had to do just with access to education and promotion

(02:36):
as a faculty member. Do you want to go back
in time and and see what led up to the
glorious birth of Title nine? Yes. The woman that we
have to thank for Title nine, who has been called
by the New York Times the godmother of Title nine,
is a laden named Bernice Sandler. And Bernice Sandler, back

(02:57):
in the sixties was teaching part time at the University
of Maryland, and she was teaching while she was getting
her doctorate. She finishes her doctorate and she's really excited
because there's seven openings in the department that she wants
to work for. And she applies for one of the positions,
and the department head says, Bernice, I like you. You

(03:23):
seem nice, but I'm just not going to give you
the job. And Bernice says, what, I am an excellent student,
I'm an excellent teacher. Why on earth would you not
give me one of these seven open positions? And he
says to Bernice, he says, Bernice, let's face it, you
come on too strong for a woman. Well dens fighting words. No,

(03:49):
she doesn't fight. She goes hevn cries, she's miserable. She
then crying words. Then she doesn't fight till later. We'll
get toss your fights later. But I mean she goes
home and basically regrets all the time she ever, you know,
spoke up too much in class, spoke up too much
in staff meeting. She regrets everything she did that might
have made her too strong for a woman. And it's

(04:11):
actually her husband who helps her figure out that the
idea of just being too strong for a woman is
sex discrimination. Right, because this is happening in nineteen sixty nine,
and although Bernez points out and um an article on
her website about this whole story that although sex discrimination
was illegal in certain circumstances, a lot of the laws

(04:33):
prohibiting just discrimination in general didn't cover sex discrimination in education.
For instance, she points out the Title seven of the
Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination and employment on the basis
of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex, but excluded
educational institutions in their educational activities i e. Faculty and administrators.

(04:56):
And also the Equal Pay Act prohibited discrimination and salaries
on the basis of sex, but again exempted all professional
and administrative employees, including faculty. So Bernice is being turned
down for more and more jobs. And she starts reading
about the civil rights movement because she wants to figure
out how African Americans had broke down these segregated systems

(05:17):
and found some form of equality. And what she comes
across is this report from the U S Commission on
Civil Rights with that had a presidential executive order that
prohibited federal contractors from discrimination and employment on the basis
of race, color, religion, and national origin. And this is
my favorite part. There was a footnote, and Bernice says
that because she was an academic, she of course read

(05:37):
all the footnotes, and she found in the footnote that
the executive had been amended by President Johnson on October
thirte to include discrimination based on sex. So it's there.
It's just no one knows it because it's in a footnote, right,
because the executive order was dealing with federal contractors and

(05:58):
colleges and universities, our federal contractors because they received funding
directly from the government. So what does Bernice do. She
gets on the phone and she calls the Office of
the Federal contract Compliance at the Department of labor Um
to raise this complaint, and she was immediately connected with
the director because he was basically waiting for someone to

(06:18):
find that very footnote and start challenging this law. And
then um, she and the director get together, they started
strategize about how to bring enforcement of the executive order.
She gets involved under the Women's Equality Action League and
basically starts a national campaign to end discrimination and education.

(06:40):
And it takes a little while and takes a lot
of mimeographing to get this done. Um, and that for
all you youngsters out there, that was that was a
joke because mimeographs were the predecessor to Xerox machines and
they weren't as omniir present as they are today. Yeah,
so it was kind of a big deal. It was
a big deal to be putting together all this paperwork.

(07:01):
And what Bernice did, again being an academic, she found evidence.
You know, she was leading this lawsuit that was filed
on behalf of all women in higher education. But in
order to really have teeth, she wanted a lot of
specifics um on ways in which women had been discriminated
against in terms of admission, financial assistance, hiring, and higher

(07:21):
education promotions and salary differentials. She is just putting together
document after document, and women are starting to hear eventually
that this is going on, and they're they're they're contributing
their own evidence to this, right UM. And during the
next two years, so this is from seventy one, she

(07:41):
files charges against approximately two hundred and fifty institutions, not
to mention another hundred or so filed by other individuals
and organizations, including the National Organization for Women and among
the institutions that UM Sandler, under the auspices of the

(08:02):
Women's Equality Action League charge uh. She points a finger
at them, University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota, University of Chicago,
and I love this, the entire state university and college
systems of California, New Jersey, in Florida. Sandler was not
messing around. She was not and so you know, she

(08:25):
got all these women to send her evidence. But she
also told all of them that they had to write
their congress people. I mean, the way that she puts
it is that they had to hire an extra person
just to deal with all the mail that these women
were sending about what was going on in higher education.
So it was really a concentrated effort by a lot
of people led by Sandler, and luckily they found a

(08:48):
lot of congress people who would go with the case
to Congress and and start to really chip away at
this discrimination. Yeah, and so they held a Congressional hearing
about the issue, and in the spring of nineteen seventy two,
which is actually two years after the hearing, um we
have we have Title nine passed. But it wasn't passed

(09:12):
as it was originally intended to be. Actually had to
be slipped into UM, the Education Amendments of nineteen seventy two,
because initially some Congress people were trying to pass the
Equal Rights Amendment and have this included as part of it.
That wasn't gonna fly. And so they slipped Title nine
out of the e r A, slipped it into this

(09:34):
Educational Higher Education Amendment, and then on like we said
June twenty three, nineteen seventy two, we have Title nine
of the Education Amendments of nineteen seventy two UM passed
by the Congress and then signed into law on July one.
And you know what I kind of liked about sandler stories,
how she said, you know that you know when all
these herrings were going on. She really wanted to go

(09:55):
out and lobby, and all the senators and representative she
was working with were like, no, don't lobby. We don't
want people to figure out what's in this bill. Yeah,
we kind of need to just speak quiet about it,
slip it in, slided and under the radar. And apparently
only a few Ivy League schools worried that they'd actually
have to admit women. She cites that Harvard, Prince snil

(10:15):
and Dartmouth were concerned that they would have to admit
women in equal numbers because they had decided that there
were specific ratios sex ratios that were best for learning,
and she didn't you know, those schools didn't want a
government tell them what those ratios were. So that was
the one stinker that came up. A few people, you know,
she emphasizes, very few noticed that because athletics were administered

(10:39):
by schools, that they too would be affected by the bill.
And so there was discussion on the floor of the
Senate about whether the bill required educational institutions to allow
women to play on football teams. And uh, you know,
there was this discussion. They decided, no, women won't play
football because it's you know, you know, it's too dangerous.
But they didn't have the foresight to think, oh, maybe

(11:00):
this is going to affect other sports besides football. Right.
But lo and behold, as we said at the beginning, now,
when we think of Title nine, I know that my
mind immediately jumps to football, and we'll not to football,
but the sports. Yes, because the Title nine is to
thank for a dramatic increase in women's participations in college

(11:22):
in school sports. For instance, according to the National Organization
of Women, in the days before Title nine, only one
in twenty seven girls played varsity high school sports, and
by two thousand one that figures up to one and
two point five for a total of two point eight
million girls playing high school sports. And similarly, only thirty
two thousand women athletes played on intercollegiate teams prior to

(11:45):
Title nine, compared with a hundred and fifty thousand today,
including more than a million dollars in scholarships for women,
especially at Division one schools. I mean, we still have
the emphasis among you know, n C double A schools
for especially men's football, men's basketball. But when you really
get down to these smaller schools, um women's sports has

(12:08):
really taken off. But you know, since we do associate
Title nine with athletics so much, I do want to
point out that there were huge benefits just an education,
things we probably take for granted. Now. Again from the
National Organization for Women, they point out that in nineteen
seventy two, women earned just seven percent of all law
degrees and nine percent of all medical degrees. Two thousand one,
women make up forty seven percent of law degrees and

(12:30):
forty of medical degrees. So you know, we do have
a lot of women in higher education and we need
to respect that. Title nine helped us do that as well.
Now as you can imagine, in the very tricky politics
of higher education in particular and even just you know,
public education, enforcing Title nine isn't always an easy thing

(12:52):
to do because when it comes to especially athletic money, um,
you know, athletic directors and apartments are not uh I
kind of want to hands off situation. It seems like
they're not they're not really into the government meddling with
with what they do. So in situations where you have
Title nine whistleblowers who come out and say, look, you know,

(13:14):
these these male coaches are being favored more than female coaches,
were not offering enough scholarships to women, etcetera, etcetera. Um,
there has been some backlash for those whistleblowers, but the
law has actually built in provisions to protect those whistleblowers right,
and that comes from the two thousand five Supreme Court

(13:36):
case Jackson versus the Birmingham Board of Education UH that
dealt with the case in which a high school girls
basketball coach who was male, said he lost his job
because he complained about the different allocations of resources between
the girls and the boys teams, things like the girls
weren't getting as much time to practice in the gym,
they didn't have, you know, the same kind of money

(13:58):
that the boys had to spend, and just by you know,
bringing that to the school's attention, he said he lost
his job. So the Supreme Court determined that not only
did the law provide for that equal allocation of resources,
it also had protection for the people who blew the
whistle and said, hey, things aren't equal here. So since
that case passed, there's been quite a few few cases

(14:21):
where people say I lost my job because I said something,
And one of the biggest cases involved a settlement of
nineteen million dollars, and so legal scholars are pretty pretty
pleased with this new development because now they know that
schools have more of a impetus to just pay their
coaches equally, because if a female coach or a male
coach somehow determines that, you know, things are in equal

(14:44):
in terms of salary, or if things are just equal
in terms of the allocation of resources, a settlement from
a lawsuit is going to cost them much more than
just doing things right the first time. Right. But as
you can imagine, there has been kind of a backlash
to the backlash, if you will, uh, because you know,

(15:05):
trying right, cutting a check for you know, nineteen million
dollars for an athletic director who says that she was
fired based on UM whistle blowing in sex discrimination UM
is mind boggling to some officials at these schools and
in these athletic departments. And some people are still arguing
that Title nine, really, while it might be beneficial for women,

(15:26):
is hurting men's sports. For instance. UM. I think about
a month ago, there was a story that came out
kind of around the same time as the World Cup
UM when the College Sports Council released the study saying
that Title nine was really hurting men's sports, especially men's soccer,

(15:47):
and their claim was the only fifty nine percent of
Division one programs, which we mentioned earlier, Division one programs
are pretty heavily involved, especially in women's sports. Uh. The
College Sports Council claim that only fift Division one programs
offered men's soccer compared with of them offering women's soccer

(16:07):
as a way to comply with Title nine. Now, the
n C Double A and the Women's Sports Foundation have
responded and said, that's a pretty skewed way of looking
at those statistics, the College Sports Council's study, because what
those Division one programs UH probably have is football, so
they might be allocating more money to their football team
then and then kind of short changing the soccer team.

(16:30):
So it's more just about what the individual school is choosing,
and you know, the law does not dictate, you know,
you can only offer football and not soccer. You can
offer both as long as there are equitable resources for
women who want to play sports as well. So that
study about the Division one programs garnered a response from
the n C Double A and the Women's Sports Foundation,

(16:50):
who claimed that that was a pretty skewed way of
looking at the statistics that you know, it was hurting
men's sports because there were so few soccer programs. Because
in Division one, which was what this College Sports Council
was looking at, uh, you've got football. You know, these
other divisions may have these strong football programs, and the
individual schools are making the choice to invest in the

(17:10):
football programs. And they made the point the title nine
does not dictate, you know, you can offer football and
not soccer. You know, the school is the ones that
make that choice of you know, we're choosing to have
a football program that may come at the expense of
a soccer program, right because in Division three schools, where
football is much less of a big business, of the

(17:31):
schools offered men's soccer teams in two thousand and eight
two thousand nine, according to that same College Sports Council's
study UM, which is actually up from eight one percent
about ten years ago, and among women's team the increase
was from seventy eight to So, like you said, Molly,
a lot of it just goes back to, you know,

(17:53):
colleges choosing which sports um to allocate their resources to.
And as you said, and as you said, earlier that
UH individual schools don't like that government meddling. Maybe if
they had their druthers, they would put a lot of
money into men's soccer and men's football, but that's what
oftenly led to the women's teams getting short change. So

(18:13):
let's talk a little bit about how UM Title nine
is enforced. They're basically three requirements that that are going
to be looked at in terms of Title nine. Yes,
the Department of Education uses a three part test, one
of which is whether or not the proportion of female
athletes is the same as a proportion of female students, UM,

(18:34):
whether or not an institution has a history and continued
practice of expanding athletics programs for women, or demonstrate that
women's athletic programs fully and effectively accommodate the interest of
current and prospective female students. But under the Bush administration
in two thousand five, there was a new policy that

(18:54):
came up dealing with the third element of that UM
Department of Education tests that was kind of controversial for
UH proponents of Title nine, and that policy change allowed
institutions to assess whether or not non athletic program fully
and effectively accommodated the interests of current and perspective female

(19:16):
students by sending out an electronic survey to their students
and having the women say, yes, I think that there
are enough sports offered at this school, or no, I
don't think there are enough sports offered at this school.
And proponents of Title nine said, WHOA, that is very
very flimsy data to offer us to say whether or

(19:39):
not a schools in compliance with it. But the Obama
administration recently went back and said it, guess what we're
gonna do away with that. So mixing this policy was
not a good news to everyone. To some people it
was like, yes, now we can look at more realistic
ways of determining interest for girls on campus. Other people

(20:00):
were like, we don't know what else to do. This
is just ridiculous. We're coming towards a system where Title
nine is gonna mean quotas. And we've talked before Christian
about how quotas are kind of a you know, slippery slope.
People don't love the idea of quotas in terms of
making sure that women are involved. Right and now, as

(20:22):
women are increasingly making up a larger proportion of college
students in the US, some people have even questioned, you know,
whether or not Title nine kind of needs to be
reined in a little bit to give more opportunity to men.
But that is something you know, that will we will

(20:42):
kind of let develop on its own, and it will
be interesting to track how that goes. But I think
at this point, UM, well, of course, we don't want
athletics or educational opportunities for men or women to be
hamstrung by government policy. There is evidence that Title nine
has been beneficial by and large, um over the past

(21:03):
thirty nine years for girls and women in the US. Right.
A large body of research shows that sports are associated
with all sorts of benefits, like lower teenage pregnancy rates,
better grades, and higher self esteem. But up until two
thousand ten, people didn't know if that was correlation or causation.
Was it possible that the girls who did have these

(21:23):
lower pregnancy rates, better grades, and higher self esteem just
had things like parents that were supporting them. Was it
just you know, personal qualities that they just brought to it.
But now there have been two separate studies that show
that team sports results in lifelong improvements, educational work, and
health prospects. Yeah, there was an article UM in New

(21:44):
York Times by Tara Parker Pope detailing these two studies,
the first of which is by Betsy Stevenson, who was
an economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania,
and she used a complex analysis to show that increasing
girls force participation in fact has a direct effect on
women's education and employment, and she says that changes set

(22:08):
in motion by Title nine explained about twenty percent of
the increase in women's education and about fort in the
rise and employment for twenty five to thirty four year
old women now. The second study was done by Robert Kastner,
who is a professor at the University of Illinois and Chicago,
and his study looked at weather Title nine had made
a difference in women's long term help. So he looked

(22:30):
at women who had been in high school in the
nineteen seventies when Title nine was taking effect against women
from earlier years, and he controlled all sorts of influences
like age, changing, diets, etcetera. And he looked at their
health outcomes and found that the women who had gotten
the chance to participate in Title nine were far healthier
and uh had a seven percent lower risk of obesity

(22:50):
twenty to twenty five years later than the women who
had not been subject to Title nine. Yeah, and uh
Tara Parker Pope points out that while seven percent does
not sound like a very huge number, no other public
health program can claim similar success in terms of curbing obesity.
And Parker Pope ends her article by saying that Title

(23:11):
nine still has a ways to go. I mean that
far more girls and women could be involved in playing sports, um,
but there's still more boys playing sports. So she comes
out sort of on the pro Title nine side. Whereas,
as we mentioned, there are a lot of people who
don't want that Title nine oversight when they're making plans
about who's going to play what sport. So while there
might be some controversy today um in terms of the

(23:35):
future of Title nine and how heavily it should be enforced,
whether we should dial it down, whether it should continue,
it's it's marched forward. I don't think that anyone can
disagree when you look at the statistics charting the progress
of women in education and in athletics and say that
Title nine was not a positive step for women and

(23:56):
also for men, Because to me, I think that anything
that benefits women getting on equal footing with men is
a good thing. You know, we need to have as
many women as men in education, teaching our kids, raising
the young, coaching, whatever. You know. I think that a
balance is good. And you know that one of the

(24:18):
sources we were looking at did say that one of
the biggest things that can change a guy's mind about
traditional gender roles might be seeing a woman, you know,
kick some but on a soccer field, or to you know,
a woman who's kicking your butt in in class on
a field if you're a coach of your team. Yeah,
so I do think like you said, it's a it's

(24:39):
a good thing. Happy belated birthday Title nine and thanks
Bernie Sandler. So if you have stories about how Title
nine has affected you in your life, we'd love to
hear them. And uh, the email address to send that
is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com. To

(25:00):
speaking of our email address, I have an email here
from Mark in England. And Noticeiz said England and not
Britain because Mark had quote a tiny quibble over my
quote unquote British accent that Claire wrote about I know,

(25:20):
not the most famous email I think we've ever gotten.
And he says I've spoken to the Prime Minister, the
Queen and all the gentlemen in funny hats um. He said,
I'll stop that now. Oh, we've got so many emails
that told you not to stop, so I think you
have to read the whole email in your accident. I
don't think you want me to do that. So he
said that while all of England is quite happy for

(25:43):
me to borrow the accent, I have to give it
its proper name. He says. What you're doing is an
English accent. There's no such thing as a British accent,
as Britain encompasses Scotland, England and Wales. We're prepared to
let it go this time, but if you insist in
calling your English accent a British accent, me, the Queen,

(26:04):
the Prime Minister, Prince Harry, Prince William, et cetera, at nauseam. Okay,
I kind of improved there for a second. Sorry, Mark,
we'll be compelled to come and recolonize you forth with.
We know you'd probably prefer this anyway, as you haven't
achieved much since independent, well apart from those moon landings,
which we all thought would jolly nice and podcast. Mark, Hey,

(26:26):
come on, I haven't heard about any uh any great
British podcasts, I mean English podcast and I'm I'm asking
for a royal but whipping now. Um. Also, if you
wouldn't mind saying, how do you minium and hubs properly
do so? Thank you Mark a funny email that mayor
but thank you to everyone who wrote in in defense

(26:47):
of of Kristen's lapses in voicing. I've got a reading
list from from indiedre to close things out. Uh Deetro
has a very ambitious reading list. She is gonna be
tackling The Brothers, caramuts Off, Don't Kotel, and Lord of
the Rings. She also writes that she plans on seeing
as many Shakespeare plays as I can get my hands on,
and hopefully seeing a few rereading the Harry Potter series

(27:09):
and rereading Jane Austin novels. So keep the list coming.
Even if summer ends and you hear this months from now,
We'll take your list anytime and again. The email addresses
mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can
also get in on the action on Facebook and Twitter,
and during the week, please check out our blog. It's
called Stuff. Mom Never told You and you can find

(27:31):
it at how stuff works dot com. Want more how
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(27:51):
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