May 29, 2008 issue
Struggling Uphill on a Grossly Tilted Playing Field
Story by Bernadette Cahill, Tables combined by Michele Cassige
Editor’s note: In the final of three articles on ASU’s compliance with Title IX, the primary federal legislation barring sex discrimination in, among many other things, sports programs at universities that President Nixon signed into law in 1972, Bernadette Cahill examines some of the wider questions complicating the issue of equity for women in varsity sports.
Officially reported statistics demonstrate that ASU has been somewhat successful in walking the tightrope of complying with Title IX, and female students express satisfaction at opportunities they have that their mothers could only have dreamed about.
The full range of statistics ASU reports on women’s participation in its sports programs, however, still indicates imbalances. These imbalances are not outside the law, but they do not tell the whole story of equity for women in sports.
Part of ASU’s operating budget reporting covers not only men’s and women’s basketball expenses, but also men’s and women’s basketball revenue. While men’s basketball revenue in 2006-07 exceeded expenses, the opposite was true for women. (See table one.) One of the reasons, said Debbie Richardson, senior associate athletics director at ASU, is that huge proportions of the gate—perhaps $35,000—are often guaranteed to men’s teams just to have them come and play. The largest amount she has ever seen a women’s team guaranteed is $12,000. Such figures are a measure of the relative importance historically of men’s and women’s sports.
This is just one example where women are still playing catch-up after many years of struggling uphill on a tilted playing field. Until Title IX, not only did women have fewer opportunities to play, but from childhood they also had fewer opportunities to train, to develop a loyal following and to build the infrastructure that attracts and provides big money.
All of these inequities are most visible in reporting for football because women don’t get to play the game. Football is the big revenue-producer in ASU’s athletics. The predominance of football becomes a huge issue when examining imbalances in the numbers of coaches and equal pay in coaching salaries (see table two). This is the area where market forces, weighted in favor of male athletes, come most into play.
“[In] the athletics department you have to [provide] equivalent treatment of the participants in the overall women’s sports program and the overall men’s sports program,” Richardson said. “[But] some coaching salaries have significantly risen due to market value in recent years. When you have 10 assistant coaches in football alone whose salaries rival many other head coaching salaries, it drives the average salary line on the men’s side higher. The experience level of coaches or their longevity at the institution can cause salary differences as well.”
Equality, Reverse Discrimination and Gender Differences
Since 1972, the year Title IX became law, the number of sports available to women to play at the college level has increased. “In 1972, fewer than 32,000 women competed in intercollegiate athletics. Women received only 2 percent of schools’ athletic budgets, and athletic scholarships for women were nonexistent.
Today, the number of college women participating in competitive athletics is nearly five times the pre-Title IX rate,” the National Women’s Law Center stated in a report to the Commission on Opportunity in Athletics in August 2002.
But the new opportunities for women’s participation in varsity sports have sometimes raised criticism from male athletes and male sports supporters, who say that accommodations to the legal requirements of women’s sports have been at the expense of male athletes.
Countering this, those who monitor women’s participation in varsity sports argue, among other things, that Title IX—and women—have become convenient scapegoats for cutting men’s sports when, in fact, cuts are made in less popular sports in order to bolster football funding (see the links in the sidebar).
Another argument against legislated equity in male and female sports is the difference in the quality of the male and female games. One side, including females who don’t support women’s games, argues that women’s playing isn’t as exciting as men’s. Richardson reluctantly agrees.
“I love watching high level collegiate competition, men’s or women’s; just at some levels men are more exciting to watch and they play a faster game,” she said.
However, if the quality of women’s games is indeed a problem, it is also a reflection of the history of women in sports. Richardson said women’s sports training needs to start in early childhood and in elementary school. Women can’t be as good as males if they start sports only in high school and miss out on ten years of training that boys get both at their fathers’ sides and in organized sports like Little League baseball.
Richardson also mentioned that males and females often differ in their approach to sports, creating challenges that numbers can’t measure. An example she cited is that team members aren’t always on the court during a game and many females don’t like sitting on the side. Often they end up dropping out, reasoning that they are there to play, not to sit. Men, Richardson said, are in the game as much for the camaraderie as for being on the field, and sitting out waiting to play isn’t a problem.
Other issues that have arisen in the area of coaching are that some female athletes prefer male coaches, while some male coaches are choosing to coach females because equal pay trends make coaching females more financially attractive than heretofore.
Links for More Info
The National Women’s Law Center report and the two articles at AthleticSchlarships.net provide additional information on Title IX.
National Women’s Law Center: Equal Opportunity for Women in Athletics: A Promise Yet To Be Fulfilled
www.nwlc.org/pdf/EOforWomeninAthletics_APromiseYettobeFulfilled.pdf
AthleticScholarships.net: Title IX and the Rights of Women in College Sport
www.athleticscholarships.net/scholarships-women-title-ix.htm
AthleticScholarships.net: Title IX Laws and Intercollegiate Athletics
www.athleticscholarships.net/title-ix-college-athletics.htm
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