Ms. Magazine Reports on the Women’s Law Project and Charlotte Murphy

Molly Duerig, WLP Intern

It’s been forty years since the passage of Title IX, a crucial piece of legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in federally-funded educational programs.  Although we’ve come a long way, cases continue to pop up that prove we still have a good deal of work to do before we obtain gender equity.

Last month, Ms. Magazine featured a story about eleven-year-old Charlotte Murphy of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Charlotte was distraught last year when her public elementary school disbanded the girls’ basketball team for a season due to lack of funding.  Then she learned that the boys’ basketball team would continue to operate as normal that season.

Charlotte was upset about the school’s decision.  However, unlike most people, she chose to speak up and call attention to the school district’s mistake.  She wrote a letter to the Superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools, Dr. Linda Lane, explaining that her school violated Title IX and asking for a meeting to discuss the situation.  Senior Staff Attorney Susan Frietsche of the WLP Pittsburgh office prepared Charlotte for the meeting.  Charlotte’s tenacity and her collaboration with the WLP resulted in a new policy that permits elementary schools in the Pittsburgh Public School District to sponsor a boys’ basketball team only if they also sponsor one for girls. The policy also requires equal treatment for both teams.

Charlotte won her battle and is once again able to play basketball at her school.  This year, there were girls’ basketball teams at 14 elementary schools, up from 3 in previous years.  While Charlotte and her team didn’t win, she was grateful to be given the chance to play just like her male peers.  As Erin Buzuvis, Western New England University law professor and Title IX expert, explained,

If the last 40 years are any indication, Title IX’s success is due to the eternal vigilance of the law’s supporters, who continue to defend it through the political process and in the courts. This vigilance must continue in order for the law to address persistent sex discrimination, and to guard against unwarranted sex segregation.

On the 40^th Anniversary of Title IX, WLP looks forward to future successes for gender equity.  We congratulate Charlotte Murphy for her spirited advocacy!

Visit our website to see a video of Charlotte discussing why she chose to speak up and why she thinks Title IX is so important.

Victory for Women’s Athletic Equity: PA High School Disclosure Bill Passes

During the closing hours of last week’s state budget frenzy, 40 years after the enactment of Title IX, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed its own landmark legislation to advance gender equality in educational opportunities. The Equity in Interscholastic Athletics Disclosure Bill passed the state House of Representatives on June 30 as part of an omnibus school code bill (HB 1901) which the Governor has approved. This provision, strongly supported by the Women’s Law Project and many other advocates for women’s equality, including the Women & Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania, will require all public high schools, middle schools, and junior high schools in Pennsylvania to report annually the number of athletic opportunities they provide to girls and boys, broken down further by race/ethnicity, as well as other data that may reflect the quality of the athletic programming offered. Pennsylvania will join Kentucky, Georgia, and New Mexico in requiring secondary schools to disclose basic information that will help inform students, parents, and community members of whether their schools may be in violation of Title IX.

Since Title IX was enacted in 1972, the number of girls participating in interscholastic high school athletics has increased significantly. However, a large gap remains between the number of high school girls and the number of high school boys playing competitive sports. In recent years, this gap has widened. There are now approximately 1.3 million more boys than girls participating in high school sports. This imbalance is greatest in urban schools, where 73% of the boys but only 45% of the girls in grades 3-12 are involved in athletics, a disparity that affects girls of color most significantly. And even where girls have the opportunity to play, in many districts, they receive inferior equipment, uniforms, fields, facilities, coaching, publicity, scheduling, and transportation compared to the boys.

Currently, female students who suspect that their school’s athletic program is treating  them unfairly must either confront school officials before they have all the facts, or file a Right-To-Know request, which can sometimes lead to administrative battles and time-consuming appeals. Beginning in 2013, Pennsylvanians will only have to visit the Department of Education’s website to obtain the basic information that is key to grassroots reform efforts.

At stake is far more than just the fun and friendship that team sports create. Participation in organized sports improves leadership skills, opens doors for college scholarships, and correlates with better grades, a better chance of graduating and getting a job, and lower rates of depression, drug and alcohol use, smoking, teen pregnancy, and obesity. In fact, over 80% of female executives report that they played a team sport in their youth.

For more information on athletic inequalities in Pennsylvania, see WLP’s publication:  Through the Lens of Equality: Eliminating Sex Bias to Improve the Health of Pennsylvania’s Women (2012);  2009-2010 Title IX Audit of the Pittsburgh Public Schools ;  Are Schools Giving Female Athletes a Sporting Chance? A Guide to Gender Equity in Athletics in Pennsylvania Schools (2009); and Gender Equity in Intercollegiate Athletics: Where Does Pennsylvania Stand? (2005)

At Two-Year Colleges, Less Scrutiny Equals Less Athletic Equality

Community colleges face unique problems in providing athletic opportunities to their students. As the Title IX blog points out, two year colleges generally have a “non-traditional student body, of which women make up the majority–often a large majority, [which] has lead many community colleges to believe they cannot possibly comply [with Title IX]. Additionally, community colleges are facing the same–if not worse–budget issues as four-year institutions.” However, the blog rightly notes that these challenges do “not mean they are exempt from providing their female students with opportunities to play sports.” Yet the New York Times revealed that many community colleges, due to lack of scrutiny about their compliance with Title IX, have significantly more athletic opportunities for their male students than for their female students.

Los Angeles Southwest College is one of the community colleges that do not offer enough athletic opportunities for women. Women make up two-thirds of their student body but only a quarter of their athletes. The college suspended their track team this year which left women at the school with basketball as the only sport they have the opportunity to participate in. Henry Washington, the school’s athletic director and head football coach said that fewer options for women are available because fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at the college. He “acknowledges that his program is most likely violating federal law by failing to offer enough roster spots to women. But he said many of the female students are also juggling jobs and child care, and do not have time to play sports.”

But federal statistics reveal that men at community colleges face the same challenges that women do. Indeed, “the men work, too, and tend not to be any younger. And yet the men, despite similar hardships or responsibilities, still manage to play sports in significant numbers.” Karen Sykes, a former president of the National Junior College Athletic Association doubts that many community colleges are putting in a genuine effort to give women more athletic opportunities. She told the New York Times that two-year colleges “were willing to make a halfhearted effort and then willing to accept the consequences.” Frank Harris III, an assistant professor at San Diego State University said, “If institutions and community colleges wanted to really provide those opportunities to women, and if there was some value in that from their perspective, they would find a way to do it.”

By denying women equal athletic opportunities, two-year colleges are neglecting to provide equal opportunity to reap the positive effects that research has suggested participation in sports creates. These effects include better health, improved self-esteem, better grades, and better jobs after graduation.

Pensacola State College in Florida is an example of how a community college, despite the unique challenges it faces, may create equal athletic opportunities. The school has recently had to deal with budget cuts and a population that is “supposedly less eager to play sports” because they “tend to be older” and “overwhelmingly female.”  Yet, they recruit throughout the state for talented female athletes and invest one million dollars a year in their athletics program. Bill Hamilton, the Pensacola athletic director, told the Times that “success had not come without struggle. But abiding by the law is a priority. ‘We don’t do things around here because it’s easy,’ he said. ‘We do things because it’s right.’”

Community colleges need to be scrutinized to ensure that they are not violating Title IX. As Jaime Lester, an assistant professor at George Mason University who has studied gender issues at community colleges said, “It’s crucial to hold these democratic institutions — these bastions of people’s colleges — up to that level of scrutiny…If we don’t hold them up, why should we hold anyone else up?”

Learn more about the Women’s Law Project’s efforts to ensure equity in athletic programs.

What We’re Reading: Title IX

Title IX, a law which requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that receives federal funding passed 39 years ago. However its promise has not been completely  fulfilled, even four decades later.  Here are some of the stories we have been reading recently which got us thinking about how far we have come in achieving equality in education and how far we still have to go.

• Parents of competitive cheerleaders at Lugoff-Elgin High School in Camden, South Carolina, are requesting a formal investigation of Title IX compliance after they say school administrators refused to pay for new uniforms.
• Some universities (including Duke, Wake Forest, and Appalachian State) listed men who assist in practices of women’s teams as members of the teams in a federal study. It is probably not the case that any of these schools did this to better fulfill Title IX requirements since, according to the article, “counting the men as part of the women’s team didn’t significantly change any of the three schools’ Title IX numbers.” However, Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a law professor at Florida Coastal and the senior director of advocacy at the Women’s Sports Foundation says that another school may use this loophole to give “‘the appearance of an untrained eye that the school would not have to add another women’s team (to be in compliance) with Title IX.’”
• Kristine Newhall addresses critiques of Title IX which argue that it creates reverse discrimination: “It seems difficult to argue that Title IX is creating reverse discrimination when men have always had and continue to have more opportunities.”
• The University of Montana, “in danger of falling out of compliance with Title IX,” started a softball program.
• Sue Estler, an Associate Professor Emirita of higher education at the University of Maine who served 11 years as the Director of Equal Opportunity and Title Coordinator reflects  on the history of Title IX and the continuing struggle to ensure that schools are in compliance with it.
• A federal appeals court will hear a case alleging that Indiana schools discriminated against girls’ basketball teams by scheduling girls’ games for weeknights and boys’ games for Friday and Saturday nights.

To find out about the Women’s Law Project’s Title IX-related advocacy, click here. Image via.

ESPN Discusses Title IX for Women’s History Month

To celebrate Women’s History Month, ESPN is discussing Title IX in a three-part video series. The series features female sports writers and coaches talking about the impact of Title IX, the pros and cons that have developed from it, its influence on their own careers, and its impact on gender notions. Johnette Howard, a sports writer for ESPN New York, says:

It changed the way that boys and men looked at girls and women and what was possible for them. There was this new confidence you were showing and you were doing something that men valued or that boys valued that you played with everyday, and so when you show you’re good at something, maybe when they’re going down the street to play, they’re like, “Hey, come on, let’s go!” And you get this whole deeper friendship and deeper experience in life.

Along with discussing the pros of Title IX, the women talk about the negative connotations the legislation has been saddled with. They highlight the oft-repeated notion that Title IX caused men’s sports to be dropped, though program elimination is usually due to disinterest and/or athletic department administrations’ decisions about fund allocations for sports.  They also note that while men’s programs are dropped, so are women’s programs. Melissa Isaacson, an ESPN Chicago columnist, says:

It’s really unfortunate because it’s not just a misconception. I think it’s brought about a real resentment and an unfair resentment of Title IX for things like wrestling and gymnastics and some of the minor men’s sports being eliminated, when in fact, women’s minor sports are being eliminated at the same time. Participation was down. But everything for awhile there seemed to get blamed on Title IX.

Jemele Hill, another ESPN columnist, chimed in:

What they don’t often talk about in those controversies is how one of the reasons that the men’s sports were eliminated is because the big revenue male sports, such as football, overspend. And that has a lot to do with why those sports are eliminated and I think that Title IX and women’s sports just became an easy target.

The panelists also highlight that even thirty-nine years after the passage of Title IX, women still face great disparities when it comes to sports.

When you look at the statistics for salary, participation, teams, revenue, money spent, or anything women still trail significantly in every category.

We thank ESPN for celebrating Women’s History Month, and bringing these amazing women on to talk about Title IX. We hope their words can bring to the light the work still needed to be done.

“If You Didn’t See the Ponytails, She Would Have Fit Right In:” Women and Sports

Recently the New York Times reported on the successes of female wrestlers in state competitions.  The article highlighted the recent Vermont State Champion in the 103 weight class, Rachel Hale. Hale defeated male competitors to become Vermont’s first female state champion and the nation’s third. Gender has now become an issue in this heavily male-dominated sport.

Still, the number of female wrestlers remains comparatively small. In most states, high school girls compete against boys, who far outnumber them with more than 270,000 national participants. The issue of gender differences is a subtext in the rough contact of these matches.

There is this pervasive notion in male-dominated sports that women are unfit to compete against boys because they are physically not suited for the sport’s rougher aspects. Detractors focus on the fact that they are women, and not their talent. This has not only been present in wrestling (in Iowa a young man recently refused to wrestle a female opponent citing religious and personal reasons), but also in baseball. Justine Siegal was the first woman to pitch in a major league batting practice, and has been present on the collegiate and professional coaching scene.

“If you didn’t see the ponytails, she would have fit right in,” said catcher Paul Phillips, one of the players who took swings off Siegal’s pitches. “She did great.”

These strong gender issues cloud women’s successes in sport, and further perpetuate the notion that women will always be a step below men. We only hope that more people can see female athletes like Rachel Hale’s coach, Scott Legacy. After her victory he remarked:

“I’m old school,” Legacy, 47, said of having a girl on his wrestling team. “This is new to me. But she’s a great kid. I see her as a wrestler, not a female.”

Senate Bill 890 Passes PA Senate Unanimously – Contact Your Rep Today!

The Pennsylvania Senate approved Senate Bill 890 by a vote of 48-0 on Tuesday, giving a boost to this key legislation that would help parents, students and gender equity advocates determine whether Commonwealth middle schools and high schools are treating girls and boys equally in athletics programs.

SB 890 is similar to the federal Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, which requires colleges and universities to annually report basic information about their athletics program, including the number of male and female participants and financial and coaching information. The EADA was passed in 1994 and has been a great tool for gender equity advocates to assess how colleges and universities are treating women’s sports programs.

Currently, three other states – Kentucky, Georgia and New Mexico – have legislation like SB 890 on the books.

This legislative session is rapidly drawing to a close, however: only eight session days remain for the PA House, and any legislation that isn’t passed by the end of the session will die. Earlier this year, the House Education Committee approved the House version of the bill, HB 2061.

This is common sense legislation that simply requires schools to disclose basic information to parents, students and community members. You can help advance gender equity in Pennsylvania’s schools by contacting your state representative today and telling them that you support HB2061 and SB890. Visit the legislature’s website to find your representative, or contact the Women’s Law Project and we’d be happy to assist you. You can find talking points on the legislation here (PDF).

During the 2008-09 school year, there were 24,794 fewer athletic opportunities available to female high school students than to male high school students in Pennsylvania high schools. And taken as a whole, female student athletes in Pennsylvania get fewer opportunities to play high school sports and are given inferior equipment, uniforms, fields, facilities, coaching, publicity, scheduling, and transportation than male athletes. The time to act is now.

Don’t let the clock run out on equality!

Book Review: Deborah Brake Brings Her A Game

Deborah Brake’s book Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women’s Sports Revolution immediately captures the attention of the reader and does not let go until the end.

Although grounded in the study of law, Getting in the Game is interdisciplinary in nature, pulling from history, psychology, and feminist theory. Brake, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and member of the WLP’s Honorary Committee for the 2010 Rights to Realities party, artfully blends theory, legal analysis and case law with stories that demonstrate how individuals have been affected by Title IX. By page six the reader has learned how instrumental athletic programs are in promoting equality and empowering young women.

Early in the book, Brake presents a detailed discussion of the three-part test for equal participation opportunities for women, which she describes as one of the most “radical of Title IX’s equality measures.” She finds the test to be successful based on the test’s emphasis on actual participation of women in sports, as opposed to “merely espousing the ideal of a gender-neutral process.”

Cheerleading has become a stronger presence in the media, both because of pop culture (movies like Bring it On) and because of Quinnipiac University’s recent lawsuit in which a federal judge ruled that cheerleading cannot be considered a competitive sport. Brake examines these changing perceptions of cheerleading and implications extending Title IX to cheerleading.  The author describes the tensions between different feminist views on the value of cheerleading, but ultimately allows for the potentially empowering nature of cheerleading for young women despite associations of cheerleaders with sexuality and subordination.

Brake also does not hesitate to discuss the possibility that a school could avoid adding additional sports for women if cheerleading were considered a sport under Title IX. However, Brake shows how Title IX parallels the feminist discussion of how cheerleading does, or does not, empower young women when she directs the reader to recent guidance from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that allows for the possibility that cheerleading may be recognized as an official sport on a case-by-case basis.

There is a bittersweet discussion of the Women’s Law Project’s Choike v. Slippery Rock University litigation and subsequent attempts by schools to engage in “roster management” in order to comply with Title IX. Although Brake concludes that the Slippery Rock case was a “qualified” victory, she notes that following the Slippery Rock decision the court allowed Slippery Rock to engage in roster management, capping rosters on male sports and expanding rosters for female sports, instead of requiring new athletic opportunities for women.

In other sections of Getting in the Game, Brake meets controversial subjects, such as claims of Title IX weakening men’s sports, head on. She also discusses mostly-ignored issues, including female athletes and pregnancy, the dwindling number of female coaches, and Title IX’s failure to protect young female athletes from sexual harassment.

However, the most impressive aspect of this book is not any one section. What makes this book a must-read for anyone interested in feminist legal theory, Title IX, or athletic programs is Brake’s ability to write in a fashion that is likely to be as compelling to younger participants in school athletic programs as it is to academics seeking a thorough and balanced examination of Title IX and women’s sports.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Recognizes Star Female Football Player

Sharon Vasquez, a defensive back for the Pittsburgh Passion of the Independent Women’s Football League (IWFL), helped the United States beat Canada 66-0 in the first International Federation of American Football Women’s World Championship in Stockholm, Sweden on July 3rd.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has a deplorable reporting record on women’s sports, surprisingly gave front page notice to the all-star, publishing a front-page feature in the sports section last Friday.
However, the opening words of the article are dismaying:

When Sharon Vasquez started playing tackle football, her husband was skeptical.

“I gotta see how she does first before I even say anything,” was how she described his attitude.

Six years, one world championship and a defensive Most Valuable Player Award later?

“He pretty much knows that I enjoy it and he’s just, ‘Whatever you want.’ “

An article on a male football player would not address any doubt that his spouse initially had towards his game because men are considered to be default athletes. While they may document the support that the male athlete’s family has given him throughout his career, they wouldn’t write about it as a surprising factor, like this article treats Vasquez.

The media continues to treat women’s athletic news as human interest stories – “soft” news written in a vaguely surprised tone that women can rise to the top of their game in any sport they pursue and that their families may be completely supportive of them. This treatment perpetuates gender stereotypes and is the reason why women’s sports aren’t yet being taken seriously.  Consequently, women’s athletics suffer in reporting – we will probably not see any further news on the IWFL, nor the other women’s professional sports leagues unless 1) the featured player is from a local team, and 2) the featured player has a compelling personal story that makes readers feel warm inside.

We congratulate Ms. Vasquez for her outstanding achievement and for her pioneering role in the promotion of football as a women’s sport, and we look forward to the day when sports sections will cover women’s athletics on an equal basis as men’s sports.

Female Role Models on the Front Page of the Sports Section

Last summer, the Women’s Law Project conducted a 10-day examination of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an attempt to find out how much coverage the sports section of the newspaper devoted to female athletes. Notable findings included:

• Zero instances of front-page coverage of women’s sports and/or female athletes
• No full-length articles in the paper regarding women’s sports and/or female athletes
• Zero pictures of female athletes were featured in the paper
• An average of 1.14% of the sports section was devoted to women’s sports.

Given these dire statistics, we were pleasantly surprised to find that Sunday’s PG featured big stories about two incredible female athletes and role models: a front page story on swimmer Mimi Hughes, who is beginning a 981 mile swim in the Ohio River this week in Pittsburgh to fundraise for Women Across the World, and a story and picture about 16-year-old Australian sailor Jessica Watson, who recently became the youngest person to sail around the world.

The goal of Hughes’s 981 mile journey, according to the organization’s website, is:

to raise funds and awareness for organizations that support the life skills and academic education of girls. The swim will focus on select organizations from the rural and urban areas of the Ohio River Valley to the remote and fragile environments of the Middle East and Africa that effectively promote education in girls and women. In return, these women and girls will transform themselves, their families and their communities.

Hughes is no novice in swimming long distances—often in filthy and polluted water—for social causes that are important to her. According to the PG,

She once swam the length of the Tennessee River—652 miles—in 2003 to call attention to pollution. She swam three freezing miles across the Bering Strait from Russia to the United States in 197 to raise awareness of social and environmental issues. Similar concerns spurred her in 2006 to swim 1800 miles through numerous countries along the Danube River followed by a 400-mile event in the Drava and Mura rivers in central Europe.

Hughes will depart from the Monongahela Ward at 9 am on Saturday, and plans to swim about 20 miles—8 hours—a day, putting her journey at about 33 days.

Watson, on the other hand, completed an incredible, record-breaking journey on Saturday, when she sailed into Sydney Harbor and became the youngest person to sail around the globe solo, non-stop, and unassisted. Watson, after being alone at sea for 210 days, said that “[p]eople don’t think you’re capable of these things—they don’t realize what young people, what 16-year olds and girls are capable of…It’s amazing when you take away those expectations what you can do.”

Watson and Hughes are both incredible role models for young athletes, girls and boys, and we are encouraged by the fact that the Post-Gazette has made covering their accomplishments, and sharing their stories, a priority for its readers.