Title IX garbage
(Written by kencraw)
The New York Times has an article up about the cuts of sports at Cal. In it, it states:
The elimination of two women’s teams — lacrosse and gymnastics — threw the Cal athletic department out of compliance with the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX. Without the five teams, the university, based on numbers it provided, will have to add 50 spots for women and eliminate 80 spots for men to meet Title IX requirements.
The reason is that if you cut even ONE women’s sport, you’re now forced to match the men/women ratio of the athletic department to the ratio of the student body. If you don’t cut a women’s sport, you can use a couple of different methods that allow for some inequity.
This is absolutely ridiculous… Let me show you how. Cal cut 5 sports:
Men’s Rugby: 63 men
Men’s Baseball: 36 men
Men’s Gymnastics: 19 men
Women’s Gymnastics: 13 women
Women’s Lacrosse: 25 women
That’s 118 men cut and only 38 women cut for those who don’t want to do the simple arithmetic. And somehow doing this is a violation of not letting women participate in sports?
Or lets look at it a different way, like on a sport by sport basis. Cal already had one more women’s sport than men’s sport, 14-13. With the cuts it’ll be down to 12-10 in favor of the women, where the only men’s only sport is Football and women have Field-Hockey, Softball and Volleyball as women’s only sports.
This is an injustice. There’s no other way to say it.
By any basis besides equal participation, a crummy way to judge things if there ever was one (what do you do if no women want to participate? Men can’t do things just because women aren’t interested?), there’s no way to justify this sort of thing. Whether we’re judging by opportunities for participation, by dollars spent, by number of sports, the men are getting the shaft. They bring in effectively all the dollars and they don’t have all the sports that the women do (you don’t think there are men who would like to play Volleyball?).
As a quick aside, I suspect the way this is going to be resolved (since it’s clear, albeit in an unstated way, from the article that the wheels are in motion to sue the university) is that with the dollars raised, both women’s sports will be retained, as well as the baseball team. That will allow the University to avoid the wrath of the unfair and keep the sport that from all indications in the one doing all the fund-raising (baseball). (Sucks to be Men’s gymnastics)
But the pragmatics of how the university will avoid this mess aside, this is a travesty and an injustice.
Title IX must go!
February 10th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Mend it, don’t end it. The rules need to be changed, but Title IX has dramatically changed the participation of women in athletics, and that needs to continue.
February 12th, 2011 at 11:28 am
“This is an injustice. There’s no other way to say it.”
It’s a significantly smaller injustice than the conditions prior to title IX, and the conditions that would likely currently be the case nationwide without title IX. I think the law has become cumbersome and rigid, but I really don’t see why equal participation is a “crummy way to judge things.” It’s way less crummier than total sports by gender, which you imply is a much more meaningful measure.
February 12th, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Total participation is a crummy way to judge things because it assume equal interest; it assumes equal value to the university; it assumes equal worthiness to participate (and I am NOT saying that women are less worthy to participate in sports in general, only that it is possible that a population of women, may not be as deserving as a population of men based on their efforts, both academically and athletically)
There’s no perfect measure and I apologize if it appeared I was suggesting that sports per gender was an especially great one. I think it is as valid as many other measures, but definitely not the sole answer.
The more I think about it, the measure that should be used in the law is funding. Dollars drive the world (sad but true). It also allows for private donations to drive exceptions to the rules.