Vice President Joe Biden's speech at George Washington University on Tuesday announcing the repeal of former President George W. Bush's policies regarding Title IX was significant step forward by the federal government. Title IX, the federal gender−equity law enacted in 1972, monumentally impacted women's opportunities to play sports in schools, colleges and universities. In the years following the institution of Title IX, Americans watched schools make enormous leaps toward establishing gender equality in sports. The number of women in high school sports increased from 294,000 in 1972 to 2.8 million in 2001. Participation by women in intercollegiate sports has made similarly impressive strides: reports show a 456 percent increase from before Title IX to after its inception.
Despite these telling results of demand for gender equity in sports, in 2005 Bush's administration enacted a policy that created loopholes regarding Title IX. Title IX originally required schools to meet gender−equity standards through one of three methods. The first is to ensure that the percentage of female and male athletes is substantially proportionate to the percentage of female and male students in the school. The second requires schools to show that they are increasing the size of their women's athletics programs. The third had schools prove that their programs met demands for women's athletics from the university's population.
The last provision was changed under the Bush administration so that schools could meet this demand by surveying female students about their interests. Under Bush's changes, a lack of complaint concerning students' satisfaction with a school's athletic programs would be taken as an indication that the school did not need to improve its representation of women's athletics. Obvious loopholes in this method showed through when schools began claiming that lack of response by students indicated a lack of demand for women's sports.
Repeal of this policy will return Title IX to its former strength. For the U.S. Department of Education, there is really no reason that Title IX should not be as strong as possible. The law was founded on the idea that there should be no discrepancy between the proportion of women and men playing sports to each gender's total population in a school. Gone are the days of antiquated misconception that men want to play sports more than women do.
Bush's 2005 policy was allegedly based partially on the fact that increasing women's sports departments negatively affects the men's departments. In fact, many schools have had to cut back funds for non−revenue−yielding sports, such as men's wrestling. While it is unfortunate that not every program has access to all the funds it needs, this is not reason enough to damage the progress that has been made by Title IX.
In response to the 2005 policy, the NCAA advised its members to ignore the changes. Then−NCAA President Myles Brand even criticized the amendment, and the current president, Jim Isch, commended its reversal. Repealing Bush's amendment is an act of shedding a preposterous loophole that sends America back in time instead of forward.
