Can Gender Equity Find a Place in Commercialized College Sports?

The premise of Title IX should be uncontroversial: no person may be ex- cluded from the benefits of an educational program on the basis of gender. 1 There is a sense in which Title IX, at the time of its adoption more than twenty years ago, simply captured what was an independent societal norm of considerable force. Women were participating in higher education, including graduate and professional education, in increasing numbers and were properly claiming a right to equal opportunities. Sexual harassment was, and is, a per- sistent problem and some disciplines have changed only slowly. 2 The prevailing perception, however, was that universities were, with varying degrees of will- ingness, reexamining their past practices and moving away from their prior model of male preferences. On the landscape of gender equity in higher education, athletics stands out as a notoriously troubled area. Participation by women in college sports has increased, but their programs are a persistent source of discouraging statistics. A majority of the students at Division I schools are women. 3 Nonetheless, women athletes receive only 35 percent of the athletic scholarship money that is distributed. 4 By common consensus there are no more than a handful of schools at which the percentage of women participating in athletics matches the percentage of women in the student body, 5 which at present is the most com- monly used standard for judging compliance with Title IX. 6 Expenditures for support of women\u27s programs, such as those for recruiting, ..