The Title IX Athletics policies survive another attack
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posted by Womenstake The official blog of the National Women's Law Center |
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by Dina Lassow, Senior Counsel,
National Women's Law Center
On December 30, 2009, the federal district court in western Virginia dismissed an attack on Title IX by a group called Equity in Athletics (EIA), and joined courts across the country in holding that the Department of Education’s (DOE) “three-part test” for evaluating whether female students are being provided with equal sports participation opportunities is lawful.
Groups like EIA, who do not believe that girls and women are as interested in playing sports as boys and men, have been suing DOE since 2002, unsuccessfully claiming that the three-part test is unfair to male athletes. Under the first prong of that test, the focus of the lawsuit, a school can show that it is in compliance with Title IX (the federal law that bars sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds) if the proportion of female athletes is substantially equal to the proportion of female students in the school.
Nationwide, while the number of female students playing sports has vastly increased since Title IX was enacted in 1972, a large gap remains. In high schools, girls are 49% of the student population, but only 41% of the athletes. In colleges and universities, they are 57% of the students, but only 43% of the athletes.
EIA had filed suit against DOE and James Madison University (JMU) after JMU announced in September 2006 that it was cutting seven men’s teams and three women’s teams in order to achieve Title IX compliance. First, the court rejected EIA’s efforts to immediately make the school reinstate the teams because the three-part test was unlawful. EIA unsuccessfully appealed that decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Refusing to give up, EIA once again asked the district court to throw out the three-part test. Once again, the court refused to do so, with a 39-page decision rejecting all of EIA’s arguments. The court reaffirmed the importance of Title IX in combating stereotypes about women, and found no discrimination against men. Its decision supporting Title IX allows the much-needed work of enforcing the law to continue.
View Original Post at womenstake.org
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- Filed Under:
- SportsPLUS, Discrimination/Title IX
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