When Title IX of the Education Amendments was signed into law on June 23, 1972, the text of the legislation said, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
If one reads the law decades later, it's understandable to wonder if something might be missing from it. What is now widely regarded as the most transformative measure in the history of women's athletics in the United States contains no mention of sports.
Its impact on the fields and courts of competition, though, has been pervasive.
Fifty years after its passage, Title IX has reshaped American sports in profound, unmistakable and beneficial ways, from elementary schools to the highest levels of competition. Athletic endeavors once practically or explicitly unavailable to women are now widely accessible to them. Previously unthinkable opportunities to play in college and professionally have emerged. Role models have showcased what's possible to younger generations.
Throughout its history, however, it has faced a slew of legal challenges and larger, existential threats. In the modern American athletic landscape, the limitations of the law can seem just as visible as its successes, with the institutions tasked with upholding Title IX too often finding ways around it and causing it to fall short of its immense promise.
Fifty years into its existence, Title IX's effect on gender equity in athletics and its current role in American sports remain as crucial and closely observed as ever.
"It's been an unbelievably important law for young girls and women to gain confidence in their bodies," said Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and professor at Arizona State's School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. "To have an equal opportunity to participate in school sports and that being defined as a fundamental civil right in this country has been hugely important in so many different ways."
'It's been a big change'
The memories of an unrecognizable world remain fresh in the minds of many women in sports. To them, the past is only so distant.
Carol Sprague, a former senior associate athletic director and senior women's administrator at Pitt, can remember when her brother started to play Little League baseball in the pre-Title IX era. She wanted to play, as well, and when she asked her father why she couldn't, he simply said he didn't know. Heather Lyke, Pitt's current athletic director, can recall stories from her mother about her athletic experiences growing up, when her high-school basketball team would practice all year long for a single game, and even once that contest arrived, only one player on each squad was able to run the full length of the court. When Lyke herself became an athlete and told her mother about her high school's facilities setup — with the boys using the 11th and 12th grade gym while the girls used the less glamorous ninth and 10th grade gym — she was given a small dose of perspective.
"My mom was like, 'Oh, Heather, you're lucky you have a gym,'" Lyke said.
When assessing the effectiveness of Title IX, such stories are helpful in measuring progress.
Statistics have reflected that sweeping change. In 1978, Time magazine reported nearly six times as many girls were playing high school sports than they were six years earlier. During the 2018-19 school year, 3.4 million girls played high school sports, up from 294,015 in 1971-72, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations. From 1982-2021, according NCAA data, female participation in college sports increased by 195% while the number of women's teams rose by 125%.
Anecdotally, it has opened doors for female athletic excellence. The accomplishments of the United States women's national soccer team, gymnasts like Simone Biles and basketball superstars like Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi and Candace Parker — to say nothing of some of the legendary figures that preceded them — would likely not have been possible without Title IX.
That increased participation has molded public opinion on the role of women in sports, a subject once widely marred by sexist tropes. Polling earlier this year from the Pew Research Center found 63% of people familiar with Title IX say it has had a positive impact on gender equity in the United States, compared to 17% who say it has had a negative impact.
"When it's passed into law, we see its greatest immediate impact is on women's athletics because the discrimination there is so obvious. The access is so limited or non-existent," said Liann Tsoukas, a history professor at Pitt who has studied Title IX extensively. "The notions that women don't want to play sport or aren't athletic or shouldn't be athletic or their bodies can't handle that, all of that is thrown out on the table and reinvestigated. That's where we see Title IX actually unroll and evolve. It happens quickly."
In recent years, Title IX's reach has evolved.
It has become an important tool on college campuses to enforce laws prohibiting sexual assault and sexual harassment while requiring universities to establish procedures to manage complaints of sex-based discrimination and sexual violence. As high-profile incidents of sexual misconduct at schools like Baylor, Florida State and LSU, among others, have arisen over the past decade, that facet of Title IX has become that much more apparent, especially after the Department of Education under then-president Barack Obama urged colleges to be more proactive in combating such crimes.
"In the years before the pandemic, if I mentioned Title IX to a classroom full of undergraduate students, they might be more likely to think about sexual assault and sexual harassment instead of sports," Jackson said.
The administrations of Obama and current president Joe Biden have confirmed Title IX's antidiscriminatory protections extend to transgender students, as well.
The benefits of playing a sport have generally helped athletes in life. In that same Pew poll from earlier this year, 82% of respondents who played high school or college sports said it had a very positive (46%) or somewhat positive (36%) impact on them. Black athletes were more likely than white athletes to say playing sports had a very positive impact on their job opportunities (27% to 16%).
"I think there was a general feeling that if sports makes a man more masculine, what does it do for a woman? What it does for a woman is it challenges her to challenge herself," said Sprague, who worked at Pitt from 1974 until her retirement in 2012. "When she's in the workforce and is challenged, it's not new to her. If you do the research and you look at corporations today, a lot of the women that are the leaders played a sport. They understood teamwork. They understood sacrifice. They understood overtime. They understand you stay until it's done."
There has been a generational quality to Title IX, as well. After 1972, women were able to pursue dreams their mothers weren't, and in the years that followed, those women had daughters who had athletic role models to follow.
Sprague has seen it firsthand. She can log onto Facebook and see a volleyball player from her tenure at Pitt now has two daughters who just signed volleyball scholarships. Earlier this year, Dana Petruska, who Sprague coached at Deer Lakes in the early 1970s, earned her 500th career win, becoming only the second active WPIAL girls' basketball coach to do so. After sending her former pupil a congratulatory text, Sprague received a response from Petruska saying if Sprague hadn't coached her in high school, she would have never reached such a milestone.
"On any given day at Heinz Field, there's a lot of men there with their sons saying, 'I played there,' or 'I did this,' " Sprague said. "Well, you didn't have that with women because they were the first. Now, they can sit there with their daughters and say, 'I did this. You can do this.' It's been a big change."
A long way to go
Title IX's 50th anniversary isn't entirely triumphant. For all the law has achieved, some of the problems it sought to eradicate still persist.
While women account for 59.5% of all college students in the United States, they're 43.9% of all college athletes, according to NCAA figures — a significant leap from 15% before Title IX's passage, but a sign female representation in college sports still lags behind their male counterparts.
A USA Today investigation last month found between 107 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, more than 3,600 additional participation "opportunities" for female athletes were created without adding a single new women's team. That number inflation is most commonly done by double- and triple-counting existing athletes, like a single runner counting as two athletes because they are on the indoor and outdoor track teams. It also occurs when male practice players for sports like women's basketball are counted as female participants. Both methods are permitted by the Department of Education.
The practice occurs at major universities locally. Pitt had 116 female track members listed on its Equity in Athletics Data Analysis (EADA) form from the 2020-21 academic year despite having only 47 athletes listed on the roster. Those 116 participants accounted for 45.1% of Pitt's total female athletes that year. The Panthers' women's basketball team had 23 members on its EADA form, which included eight male practice players. Penn State had 30 women's basketball players reported on its EADA submission despite having just 15 on its roster, along with 122 track and field athletes (compared to 53 on the roster) and 27 female fencers (compared to 18 on the roster). West Virginia had 92 female track athletes on its EADA form despite having 38 on its roster, as well as 46 rowers listed for a team that had 33 on its official roster.
"Specific provisions for athletic opportunities allowed institutions great flexibility to meet compliance," Tsoukas said. "Institutions had to show progress or meet standards in one of the three prongs, some of which were ambiguous, such as accommodating athletic interests of the student population. The inevitable result was that schools could technically be in compliance with Title IX — or meet the letter of the law — while sidestepping the spirit of the law."
Obstacles to the law's implementation continue to exist. The Obama-era initiatives on sexual assault and transgender athletes were rescinded by Donald Trump's administration, only for Biden to reaffirm the transgender and nonbinary protections in June 2021. That back-and-forth stokes fears the effectiveness of Title IX is vulnerable to whatever political party occupies the White House at a given time.
While Title IX is used to enforce sexual misconduct laws on campuses, some believe the process for litigating those cases should undergo fundamental changes.
"That intersection of rotten power dynamics in intercollegiate athletics and the patchwork way in which Title IX offices work on campus and how it's more from the perspective of protecting the university rather than the students or the people bringing forward those cases, that's when you get Baylor, that's when you get LSU. That's the result," Jackson said. "Athletic departments should not be in charge of investigating Title IX complaints."
For all the opportunities Title IX has provided women on the fields and courts of competition, the power structure of college sports at its highest level is still overwhelmingly male. Only seven of the 65 schools in the Power Five conferences have a female athletic director, a number that will drop to six when Penn State's Sandy Barbour retires at the end of the month.
The stories of leaders like Lyke are inspirational and potentially instructive, but there simply aren't enough of them. To some, it speaks to how much work remains.
"Sometimes, you become conditioned or, 'Hey, this is just how it is.' You become not numb to it all, but, OK, this is just how it is," Lyke said. "The reality is we have to continue to progress. The number of female leaders — certainly athletic directors — has never been more than six or seven in the Power Five. That's not right."
Reminders of disparate treatment between male and female college athletes remain, at times to the point of being painfully obvious.
In 2021, contrasting pictures of workout facilities for the Division I men's and women's basketball tournaments — the former of which had a spacious weight room while the latter had only a small rack of light weights and a few yoga mats — generated outrage and prompted change. It wasn't until this year the women's tournament was also branded as "March Madness" by the NCAA. In a Washington Post story last year, Division I softball coaches bemoaned the gap in the quality of facilities between their NCAA tournament and the Division I baseball tournament.
A pair of reports released last year by a law firm hired by the NCAA to investigate gender equity issues found college sports' governing body has drastically undervalued its Division I women's basketball tournament from a media-rights standpoint and regularly prioritized its Division I men's tournament at the expense of its women's one. For its non-basketball championships, the NCAA spent about $1,700 less per women's participant than men's participant in 2018-19.
"Across the spectrum of services for sports, the women had the short straw," Sprague said. "They fought that. It's like the NCAA tournament a couple of years ago when the girl took a video of the weight room. It's like, 'Who's surprised?' "
They are the kind of revelations that, while biting, may lead to long-overdue improvements.
The landscape of women's athletics changed dramatically over the first 50 years of Title IX. The hope among women in sports and those who study Title IX is the next 50 years can provide similarly sizable steps.
"The basic thrust of Title IX cannot be dialed back," Tsoukas said. "It's too integral to the fabric of our society. It's not a one-issue cause, Title IX. It has spanned out and reshaped the world in which we live. Little girls grow up with a certain set of expectations of what they can do and what they're entitled to and that they can be champions and that they can compete and that they will have options and that sport offers access and opportunity and life lessons. Our society is sort of built around that notion now."
