Gender Profiling

A new update to a the Women in Intercollegiate Sport: A Longitudinal Study shows that overall women continue to make great strides on the college level, but fall short of what women hoped to achieve under Title IX.

The study which has now been produced for 31 years is the product of research by Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta who are both professors emeritus at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

In the latest update that was just released the authors note that since Title IX was enacted in 1972 intercollegiate women’s sports programs and participation have soared. The study covers the last 31 years since the compliance date for Title IX was in 1978.

The goal of Title IX was to bring equality to intercollegiate sports by giving female athletes more equal footing with men’s programs which dominated college sports at the time. As the study states there is now a record 9,101 women’s sports teams with an average of 8.65 teams per school up from 5.61 in 1978 though the growth is slowing.

The study while trumpeting this increase along with the record number of females now employed in intercollegiate athletics at 14,742 bemoans that this progress still isn’t good enough because of the lack of proportionality. Women now represent about 57% of the college population but their ranks in at the administration levels are well below that figure. Or as the study’s author put it, “The female voice is more often present than at any time since 1984, but it is often a solitary voice.” Shades of the Equal Rights Amendment fight.

By reading this study the reader id left with the impression that there is still a great deal of inequality in intercollegiate sports. Yet according to the College Sports Council the rise of women’s programs has come at great cost to men’s programs which have been in a steady decline for years. According to a similar Title IX study by the Council the number of men’s teams has dropped to an average of 7.8 per school which is below the women’s teams average cited by the Acosta-Carpenter study. I guess that’s why the latter study is now focusing on administrative balance since Title IX has largely done it’s job of neutering many men’s programs.

The NCAA will undoubtedly hold this latest study up as an example of progress but with much work yet to be done. For those that know better it is just another sign of the rampant political correctness the pervades college sports which trumps all reason and leaves many male athletes who once dreamed of wrestling, swimming etc.. at a higher level with few prospects. So who is being discriminated against now?

Don Irvine is the chairman of both Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.