Girls Gone Wild Again

Latrobe, Pa.—The federal government’s Title IX regulations have led colleges to eliminate popular men’s sports teams and add moribund women’s athletic franchises in order to prove gender neutrality in athletics. The number of male athletes on campus has, correspondingly, decreased over the past two decades while the number of women on collegiate playing fields rose, according to the U. S. Government Accountability Office.

Meanwhile, high school sports remains the one extracurricular activity in which men are more likely to participate than women, Allison Kasic and Kimberly Schuld of the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) point out in a study published by the IWF. Undaunted, supporters and enforcers of Title IX regulations plan on applying them to scientific professions, whether doing so leaves laboratories empty or not.

Author Jessica Gavora, who has monitored the impact of the federal rules for a good part of her career, calls the effort “Title IX feminist penis envy.”

“The issue of Title IX enforcement in sports is over,” Gavora said at a conference here. “What we’ve got is what we’re stuck with.”

“Now its proponents are on to the more valuable real estate of science.” Gavora wrote the book Tilting The Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX.
“The Bush Administration formed a commission on Title IX dominated by the law’s proponents in 2003,” Gavora explained of the regulation’s institutionalization in college sports. “Then the Bush Administration said it would only accept unanimous recommendations from the commission.”

Like athletics, the sciences have long been dominated by men, a trend that feminists would like to reverse. “Women are leaving the field of physics at every level,” physicist John Smetanka said at the conference here at St. Vincent College. “In high school, 45 percent of women take physics, 35 percent go on to get their bachelor’s in it, 25 percent get their master’s in it and 17 percent enter the profession.”

“We will not achieve gender equity in our lifetime at this rate.” Dr. Smetanka serves as the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Academic Dean of St. Vincent.

Women in physics who also want to be wives and mothers frequently opt to fulfill their domestic ambitions over their vocational ones. “Female physicists are most likely to be single without children,” Dr. Smetanka admits.

He is quick to point out that St. Vincent can boast of its share of sports teams for girls. Dr. Smetanka also claims that there are equal opportunities for women in science at the traditional Catholic college.

Gavora, who has studied the effects of Title IX extensively, said that opportunities alone are unlikely to satisfy federal regulators. “They want to see bodies,” she said at the Civitas forum at St. Vincent.

The attempt to transcend nature is leading feminists on this crusade, Dr. Elizabeth Kaufer-Busch notes. Dr. Kaufer-Busch is an assistant professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University.

She quotes feminist scholar Susan Ware’s assertion that “Nature is a political strategy.” Ware’s notion is one that the Pittsburgh native rejects as absurd.

“Have you ever seen a man and a woman naked?” she asked the crowd. “They’re different.”

Similarly she discounts Debra Rollison’s allegation that “we have had ten centuries of affirmative action for men in academia.” “The American academy has only existed for two centuries,” Dr. Kaufer-Busch observes.

She is the founder and co-director of the Center for American Studies and Civic Leadership at Christopher Newport. The Civitas Forum is an annual program of the Center for Political and Economic Thought at the Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government at St. Vincent College.

The F. W. Kirby Foundation supports the program. Full disclosure: Yours Truly also spoke at this forum as the keynote speaker. All of the speeches delivered at the October 8th St. Vincent conference will appear in the Civitas Journal.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.