At a Capitol Hill press conference on February 26, former Stanford soccer star Julie Foudy, ’93, challenged a federal commission chaired by athletics director Ted Leland, PhD ’83, calling its findings on Title IX “biased and slanted.”
Foudy served on the 15-member Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, but refused to sign its final report. The group looked at the 30-year history of the law that bans gender discrimination at schools receiving federal funding (“What’s Next for Title IX,” March/April) and recommended changes in how it is implemented.
Captain of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and former president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, Foudy argued that the document “fails to recognize the discrimination that still exists” against women participating in sports. “Other than mentioning one statistic, nowhere does the report address the participation disparity of 18 percent between men and women.... Rather, the report’s emphasis is on rectifying the exclusion of men,” Foudy wrote in a letter to Leland and commission co-chair Cynthia Cooper. Foudy and Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona issued a dissenting report with its own recommendations, principally that Title IX’s current policies remain intact.
Hours after Foudy’s announcement, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said he would only accept the commission’s 15 unanimous recommendations and disregard eight proposals in the report that prompted the dissent.
