As he finishes co-chairing a federal panel charged with reassessing Title IX and sports, athletics director Ted Leland predicts changes to come. “We’d be less than honest with ourselves if we said everything is perfect, because it’s not,” he says.
The landmark 1972 statute that bans gender discrimination at schools receiving federal funding was the focus of six months of scrutiny by the 15-member Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, which Leland headed along with former WNBA player Cynthia Cooper. After consulting with experts and holding town meetings across the country, panel members voted in late January to recommend several alternatives for moderate changes to Title IX’s implementing regulations.
What did the panel hear on its travels? “Public support for Title IX is phenomenal—I think many of our politicians would love to have the popularity ratings that Title IX has,” says Leland, PhD ’83. Nonetheless, “a lot of people said, ‘Equal opportunity for women is great, but I think the law ought to be administered differently—it’s been contorted, it’s been confused, it’s been convoluted.’”
The No. 1 concern is proportionality—requiring schools to maintain roughly the same percentage of female athletes as female students. This is the most widely used and easily proven of three tests that schools can choose to establish Title IX compliance. Opponents (including the National Wrestling Coaches Association, which has filed a lawsuit) charge that a proportionality standard is an impermissible quota system and forces budget-strapped schools to eliminate some men’s programs. Many in the civil rights community, however, consider proportionality not only legal, but critical to the success of Title IX, under which women’s participation in sports has increased tenfold at the high school level and fivefold at the college level in the last 30 years.
The commission decided not to recommend eliminating the proportionality standard, but did suggest such modifications as clarifying and increasing the flexibility of the proportionality rule, counting standardized roster slots rather than individual players, or exempting nonscholarship walk-on athletes. It also recommended expanding the role of surveys to gauge student interest in athletics for schools electing a compliance method other than proportionality. Many of the proposals were not approved unanimously, and largely at the urging of U.S. women’s soccer team captain Julie Foudy, ’93, dissenting views were included in the report submitted to Education Secretary Rod Paige.
Leland, who begins a two-month special research leave on March 1, says the commission heard about a number of what he calls “negative unintended consequences” of Title IX. Some schools have dropped low-profile men’s teams like swimming, tennis, gymnastics and wrestling to meet proportionality requirements; others have created what Leland calls “false opportunities” for women who are counted on team rosters but have little or no access to coaching and training. “I see [the commission’s proposals] as a first step in potentially changing the way the law is administered,” he says.
At Stanford, the stats on women’s sports have climbed markedly since Leland was hired in 1991. Female athletes have seven new locker rooms, plus new softball and field hockey facilities. The number of athletic scholarships for women has increased from 74 in 1990 to 139 today. The Cardinal has added five varsity women’s teams in the past 10 years: softball, synchronized swimming, water polo, lacrosse and lightweight crew. And proportionality? The 401 women who competed on varsity teams in 2001-02 represented 46 percent of Stanford athletes, at a time when the percentage of women in the undergraduate student body was 49 percent. That, says Leland, comes within the federally accepted “wiggle room” of 3 percent to 5 percent.
But will this sort of change continue at colleges across the country? “[The commission’s] recommendations give the Bush administration carte blanche to change anything that it is so inclined to change,” Jocelyn Samuels, a vice president of the National Women’s Law Center, told USA Today. Leland counters: “There’s no push by the [Bush] administration to do away with equal opportunity for women in athletics. At the same time, I think it is fair to say that after 30 years of off-and-on implementation of this law, it’s time for the government and the American sporting community to sit down and say, ‘Where are we, how have we done, and how can we make this thing better?’ ”
