BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published April 16, 2009

It was one of those PR disasters that someone really should have seen coming. The President of the United States was going on national television to showcase his populist appeal by sharing his bracket for March Madness 2009, but oops … he forgot about the women. When President Obama appeared on ESPN to discuss his men’s final four picks, he failed to mention the other half of the NCAA basketball playoffs: the women’s tournament.

This oversight just might be excusable considering the President has a few other things on his mind — war, economic failure and Washington politics to name a few — but it was no surprise that someone stepped up to point out the faux pas. Among those who did was USA Today columnist Christine Brennan who, in her column and again on NPR, criticized the President for what she felt was a slight to women’s athletics.

While this was expected, what wasn’t expected was the torrent of negative comments about Ms. Brennan on several blogs because of her complaint. On one of these blogs, a political commentary called “the vote blog” written by Jimmy Orr and Dave Cook, posters under the guise of anonymity ripped into not only Ms. Brennan but also women’s basketball in general.

Of the many, mostly male, posters, one identified only as David wrote, “I am so tired of ‘special interests’ getting all over others, in this case President Obama, for not being politically correct. Get over yourselves. I hope the day never comes that these Title 9ers are going to force me to watch these mind-numbing games for the sake of being ‘PC’!” It was this comment as well as others claiming women’s basketball to be too boring to watch and Ms. Brennan as too attention starved to deserve merit that are the true story of this incident, and they demonstrate perfectly how insecure women’s sports still are in this country.

The fact that there is a women’s tournament at all to choose a bracket for is, in part, thanks to Title IX. But unlike what David suggests, supporters of this law are not trying to force those who don’t want to watch women’s sports to do so. In fact, when it was enacted in 1972 as part of the Education Amendment of 1972, Title IX was not even targeting sports at all but instead education programs in general.

The law reads: “no person in the 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 receiving Federal financial assistance.” Perhaps unintentionally, included in these education programs were athletics. Later rulings clarified Title IX’s jurisdiction over college sports and physical education programs as well as established the “three prong test” to determine whether an athletics program was in compliance with Title IX.

This test requires that in order for a school to meet the regulations, it either has to offer opportunities for male and female students to participate in athletics in proportion to the percentage enrolled in the school, have a “history and continuing practice” of expanding its sports program to meet the interests of the underrepresented sex, or demonstrate that the interests of the underrepresented sex have been fully met by the school’s current program.

This small piece of legislation has drastically impacted women’s sports and is responsible for an increase of the average number of women’s sports team per school from 2.5 in 1970 before the law was enacted to 8.45 in 2006, the highest number of teams ever, according to a longitudinal national study of women in intercollegiate sport performed in conjunction with Smith College’s project on women and social change and Brooklyn College. This and the other amazing accomplishments of the law were celebrated last week in Swarthmore’s first annual women in sport symposium.

I applaud the tremendous amount of work of the organizers to make this symposium possible and the highly qualified panel of female sports professionals as well as the keynote speaker, longtime Title IX activist Jen Shillingford, assembled to speak about the history of women in athletics. However, I must admit, I was slightly disappointed about what was discussed at the event. Or more accurately, I was disappointed about what was not discussed.

Assembled in the lecture hall was a group of highly intelligent and politically active female college athletes who experience firsthand the benefits of Title IX. Yet the discussion rarely approached topics outside of what Title IX was and why it is an important law to protect. However, it is not the law but the strides toward equality we have made because of the law that need to be protected.

The law itself is flawed and was never meant to be able to account for the infinite complexities of collegiate athletics. Because of the law’s lack of specification for sports, both men and women involved in athletics have found areas to critique, one of these being that the law actually hurts some men’s sports.

Ms. Shillingford addressed this belief with a handout from the National Women’s Law Center that explains that it is not Title IX that forces schools to cut men’s programs, but school administrations that would rather eliminate what are considered “minor” men’s sports, like wrestling and gymnastics, than to cut back on the high budgets for men’s sports like basketball or football. While this is true, these so called “minor” men’s sports are still being negatively affected or cut altogether and Title IX is not able to prevent this from happening.

Women should know better than any other group what it is like to be forced out of athletics by popular men’s sports since we have spent the last 40 years fighting our way back from the exact position that these “minor” men’s sports are in now. Thus, women’s athletic programs should be the best allies for these sports teams, not the scapegoat for their lack of funding. Although there are still big strides that need to be made to achieve true gender equality in sports, we need to recognize that other inequalities deserve to be addressed as well.

The discussion needs to change from simply talking about how we can protect Title IX to talking about how we can work toward our goals in conjunction with men’s sports and whether Title IX is the right law to accomplish the complex task of creating equality in athletics. It is clear from the blog comments discussed above that women’s sports are not secure enough to survive without legislative protection. However, we cannot fall into complacency with Title IX – we must continue to search for a law that can protect women and men’s rights to participate in the sports of their choosing.

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