There’s a Title IX Game Being Played (and it’s NOT helping female athletes)
May 13, 2009 – 6:49 pmBy Laura Pappano
Whether or not a judge rules that Quinnipiac University has violated Title IX by cutting its Women’s Volleyball team is less newsworthy than what we learned in court today.
That is, coaches manipulated rosters to meet Title IX requirements with men’s teams dropping players (and women’s teams padding rosters with players who wouldn’t get uniforms, equipment, playing time, or be able to travel with the team) in time for the school to submit required reports to the U.S. Department of Education showing they met gender equity rules.
Quinnipiac, like many colleges, chooses to demonstrate compliance with Title IX by meeting the proportionality prong of regulations. This means that the percentage of males and females in the student body must be reflected in the percentages of male and female athletes.
Increasingly, schools have used “roster management” as a tool to do this, meaning they will set target roster sizes for each sport to make numbers add up. This approach – we are hearing — is vulnerable to cheating.
Quinnipiac softball coach Germaine Fairchild, testified that she had been ordered to carry 25 players on her roster when she would normally have 17 to 19. Because these additional players were essentially only for compliance purposes (she did not receive extra budget to support their participation), most of them quit and by spring she could trim her roster to a manageable and appropriate 17.
“The number of female athletes receiving actual benefits was 17, not 26,” she testified, according to news reports.
Such manipulation of roster slots is outrageous – but likely not new and not limited to Quinnipiac University.
Two years ago, USA Today did a story highlighting the discrepancies between proportionality numbers as reported to the NCAA and to the U.S. Department of Education.
Unfortunately, the DOE collects, but doesn’t scrutinize the data it demands (or apparently care if it looks different from the NCAA numbers). This is a matter that needs attention – otherwise all the happy talk about the “benefits of Title IX” are merely camouflage for old-style gender bias.
3 Responses to “There’s a Title IX Game Being Played (and it’s NOT helping female athletes)”
Title IX’s policies are so ambiguous that it makes it easy for schools to falsify compliance by methods that were used by Quinnipiac. “A school has a history of continuing practice of expanding opportunities for the underrepresented gender” seems pretty vague to me. The NCAA fought Title IX back when it was being introduced into legislation so the discrepancies between the NCAA and the US Department of Education shouldn’t seem surprising.
What are your thoughts on the High School Athletics Accountability Act that was reintroduced in the House of Representatives? Do you think if this passes high schools will find ways to fudge these statistics too?
By the way, I loved your book, Playing with the Boys. I thought it gave incredible insight into Title IX’s shortcomings and made a thought-provoking argument into desegregating sports. The court cases hit home for me since I played high school football for 2 years. A couple of the girls who paved the way were from towns in Westchester County, where I live and went to school.
By Zalika Green on May 15, 2009
Zalika — First of all, you’ve got a great website and I so admire the HS football cred!! Just wish I had thought to play — it seemed outrageous enough at the time to take shop & play boy soccer & baseball.
I am of two minds about Title IX. I agree that it is maddeningly complicated (and vague in parts) and certainly in the big picture has created a two-tiered sports system. On the other hand, the pragmatist in me realizes that right now, it’s all we’ve got — and skirting it should do two things: 1) stir outrage and 2) realize that we need to address the deeper cultural/social bias that underlies the inequity issue.
As for HS Athletics Accountability Act, the journalist in me wants all the information I can get. If requiring high schools to report, makes them also count, look, and consider – that’s a good thing.
Keep doing what you’re doing!
By Laura on May 15, 2009