Thursday, April 28, 2011

The Decline of Title IX

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Title IX is a United States Amendment from 1972 that fueled the women’s rights movement and today it prevents gender discrimination in high school and college athletics. Or that’s what it’s intended for. Throughout the nation, mostly at colleges and universities, athletic departments are finding loopholes to Title IX. It seems either these highly trained and knowledgeable administrators are blatantly breaking the law, or they just can’t count.

The Women’s Cross Country team at the University of South Florida has been counting their female athletes not only on the cross-country team, but also the indoor and outdoor track team (whether they have ever competed for those teams or not).

At Cornell, the Women’s Fencing team has been reporting their male practice players as female athletes. This is common all across the country as male practice players are seen in women’s basketball, crew, and hockey which leads us to believe that the improper mathematic abilities of athletic departments is an epidemic.

Schools are using these tactics to prevent having to make cuts from their men’s teams or even dipping into their budgets to fund an entirely new women’s team. Even with the unethical practices, the average proportion of female enrollment is 7% more than the average involvement in athletics. As athletic departments continue adding football programs or creating additional roster space on their current football teams, this problem will persist. Universities have to compensate somehow with the large men’s sports programs by cutting, manipulating, or miscalculating their female athletes. 

-Written by Hayley Zedeck

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