Fifty Years of Title IX, an Interview with Victoria Jackson
The former star athlete and current scholar of sport history drops some serious knowledge
Fifty years ago today, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, a set of laws intended to include women under various provisions of US anti-discrimination law they were previously excluded from. The best known part of that act is Title IX. The relevant passage reads:
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.
Though it does not mention sports, it was apparent early on that the law would affect athletics at American educational institutions. In 1974, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) published guidelines making explicit that Title IX did, in fact, extend to intercollegiate athletics and eventually to high school athletics as well. In 1979, the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education issued detailed guidance related to compliance with Title IX. That guidance included the articulation of a three-pronged test for determining whether schools were complying with the law.
The great Victoria Jackson will elaborate on all of this below, but first some context for appreciating the impact of the law. According to the New York Times, before the law’s passage, about 30,000 women played college athletics (which represented less than 20% of all college athletes). In 2021, “more than 219,000 women participated in college sports, making up 44 percent of all college athletes.” Before 1972, fewer than 300,000 girls were participating in high school sports, compared to 3.7 million boys. In 2019, the numbers were 3.4 million girls to 4.5 million boys. Professor Jackson adds that about one percent of athletic funding in colleges went to women’s sports before 1972.
The benefits of Title IX extend far beyond these raw numbers. As Professor Jackson recently told ESPN’s Sara Spain, Title IX is fundamentally about the right of girls and women to an equal access to education. Athletics themselves, Jackson points out, have been profoundly important for many girls “to gain confidence in their bodies.” Victoria herself was an elite athlete. She was recruited to run track at UNC (go Heels!). Jackson was unable to compete during her final two years in Chapel Hill. But since she had remaining eligibility, when she went to Arizona State for graduate school, she was able to resume her track career, where she became a championship level runner in the 5,000 and 10,000 meter events. Victoria then ran professionally for three years before returning to ASU to complete her PhD. She is now a professor of sports history there and is a nationally recognized scholar and public intellectual on issues of collegiate athletics and Title IX.
Luckily for me, I get to count Victoria as a friend. And even though she’s in serious demand right now, she was kind enough to do this interview with me via email. I’ve edited some for space for clarity.
It’s on the long side, but the issues are complex and deserve a comprehensive airing.
JW: As we celebrate its 50th anniversary, USA Today has just done a systematic analysis of the state of Title IX across the country. They found that 87% of colleges and universities were out of compliance with the law. Did that figure surprise you? Does it suggest that we've stalled out or even gone backwards in terms of ensuring equal access to athletic opportunities for women?
VJ: Yes, the team at USA Today did an excellent job to convey at scale the participation numbers games colleges play in their Title IX reporting for the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) database (which the government established in the 1990s to monitor compliance).
Schools have to prove compliance with Title IX when it comes to participation opportunities in one of three ways: 1) having a gender ratio of athletics participants that reflects the overall student body gender ratio of the university 2) demonstrating a history of continuing to expand opportunities for women in sport (for example, like adding a new women’s team), or 3) proving that the school has met students’ athletics participation needs and interests (this is the so-called three-pronged test noted above).
Crucially, what USA Today discovered is that of the 107 public Division I FBS schools they analyzed, was that more than 3600 participation “opportunities” were created in the 2018-2019 academic year (the last year before the coronavirus pandemic) but not one new women’s sports team had been added. So… were these schools really proving compliance?
There have been three main ways schools have manipulated their participation numbers to artificially increase the number of women participants:
1. Bloating rosters by recruiting women on campus to join a team at the beginning of a season when teams typically perform the participation count. For example, a school might report 100 rowers to the EADA, but if you look on the school’s website, you’ll see more like 50 on the website’s official roster.
2. Counting men who practice with women’s teams as women (JW: this one is especially hard to believe). Some schools had more men playing women’s basketball than women playing women’s basketball. (There are women who practice with men’s teams, and, crucially, these women are not counted as men.)
3. Counting women who play multiple sports multiple times. Distance runners like me can be counted three times for the participant count… we can be three people since we compete in cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track and field. Men who compete as distance runners are not counted this way.
Once we had found out that schools were playing these games, the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education could have put an end to these practices. But instead, these practices have become entrenched and now nearly all schools have adopted them. If you look in the EADA database today, you will see that schools are required to perform a duplicate count of participants and to count male practice players as women. You are reading this right… by making this information a required part of reporting for the sake of transparency—the OCR in the Department of Education ended up institutionalizing and entrenching the practices. Unintended consequence, to say the least!
There is good news: We should be seeing in the coming months the results of a sweeping review of all aspects of Title IX conducted by Secretary Miguel Cardona’s Department of Education, at President Biden’s directive. The lesson here is that investigative journalism matters! I have no doubt that while these practices might have been well known in places like my ASU history classrooms, the power for change comes in massive efforts and knowledge sharing like what the USA Today team unleashed.
JW: Many advocates of reform, including you, think it's long past time that we spin off college football into its own entity. It's a multibillion dollar industry that the NCAA has been farcically claiming is an education-first enterprise for decades. It's time to give up the ghost, acknowledge it for what it is and compensate the workers who generate this revenue - the players - accordingly (all of which I agree with). Can you explain more specifically how removing football from the college athletics umbrella that all the other sports fall under will improve athletic opportunities for women? This is a really important point and I want that to be as clear as possible.
VJ: The fact is, football money has made women's college sports, especially in the Power 5 (the five major football conferences, comprising about 75 schools), the best-in-world athletic opportunities for women today.Football money is reflected in facilities improvements that make college athletes' experiences (facilities, support staff, travel, etc) better than most professional athletes' experiences around the world.
Because women athletes, especially in the Power 5 are enjoying world-class athletic and academic experiences, we're supposed to be grateful and show that gratitude for our afterthought, subordinate roles.
But I believe that as long as football is part of the intercollegiate athletics department in a way that does not treat football as the unique sports industry it is, women will forever be placed in a subordinate role.
I've had many conversations with Olympians and athletes who are best in the world at what they do, and we share stories of these experiences that tend to make and keep women athletes frustrated. I spoke with Anna Cockrell for The Athletic story about football players paying for Olympic development, and she shared a story about when her USC relay team had broken a collegiate record and the main social feed for the Trojans that day was solely focused on the release of the men's basketball team's new shoe. A common experience among NCAA national champion athletes in Olympic sports is frustration at the crappy football team being treated as gods and going .500 for the season and making a mediocre bowl game when (the women) are the actual athlete gods on campus.
In the last year and a half, though, the NCAA commissioned a gender equity review which proved the NCAA model is mainly focused on elevating the brand and value of men's basketball at all costs, including manipulating the market to drive down the value of women's basketball. I enjoyed blasting the NCAA on that issue for Global Sport Matters. Gender inequity is not a bug, but a feature.
In that vein, Professor Jackson shared her larger vision for how to reshape college athletics.
VJ: Yep! I want to burn it all down and start from scratch. 😊I wrote about this for Global Sport Matters.
I want to see a complete youth sports/school sports/Olympic sports organizational overhaul. I want to see college sports redesign as only one piece of a broader American sports total rethinking. We don’t need an NCAA, just like it turns out we didn’t need an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for Olympic sports governance. (The AAU pivoted to dominate youth basketball, but that’s a different story for another day.)
The U.S. is one of the few places in the world without a sports minister and without public funding of Olympic sports. (This is a product of our Cold War rivalry with the Soviets… their athletes were state-supported cogs of the Communist regime and our athletes were amateurs who plays sports the right way and were not morally corrupted. American Olympic athletes, funded through private donations and corporations, represent why capitalism is superior to communism, etc etc) But it is football athletes who pay for Olympic dreams—Americans and the world’s Olympic hopefuls too, and I don’t think football athletes should have to subsidize the Olympic movement anymore. But what if we introduced a tax on sports betting to fund American Olympic development? What if we ran that money through American colleges, who already receive federal dollars in other ways, so many of which are public universities, and who already have world-class (really, best-in-the-world) facilities and sports development infrastructure?
I actually strongly believe there is opportunity for women’s sports and Olympic sports if football is separated out (and football athletes finally get what they deserve). In a policy paper advocating for the Power 5 conferences to start paying football players I argue that this will enable women’s sports and Olympic sports to come out from under the shadow of football. Thinking about the global nature of sports media rights and the incredible value thanks to sports being the remaining phenomenon people watch live on TV (or streaming platforms), there is huge potential for Power 5 Olympic sports to go global. The Pac 12 conference would have placed 5th in each of the past 2 summer Olympic Games, if the conference were a country. In Rio, the Pac 12 had 246 athletes representing 47 countries. In the SEC, the Southeastern Conference, 53 countries were represented. There are Olympic sport rosters in the Power 5 conferences made up of entirely international athletes. When 2 Pac-12 water polo teams play, the game is like a mini-Olympics, but with a dozen countries represented across the two teams. The Women’s College World Series is among the best sport entertainment products, period. Power 5 track and field conference championships have drama and create incredible narrative arcs because the team competition often comes down to the 4x400 relay at the end of the meet. It’s good TV, and anyone anywhere in the world is going to see that and want more.
JW: We're entering a new era in college athletics, one in which athletes now have the opportunity to earn significant income while still competing in college, via their names, image, and likeness (NIL). Some men's football and basketball players are making over a million dollars a year now. And some women, like UConn's great hoopster, Paige Bueckers, are also making significant money. In terms of equal education access, how do you view these developments? Are they good for women athletes?
Name, image, and likeness returns to students who play sports the economic rights of all athletes. My friend Ramogi Huma (executive director of the National College Players Association (NCPA)) has always said that NIL is an economic justice issue and a racial justice issue. In the context of women’s sports, because for so many women’s sports, intercollegiate athletics represents the pinnacle of the sport, NIL becomes a gender justice issue too. For example, the Women’s College World Series in softball outperformed the Men’s baseball College World Series by 60% in viewership ratings. These women are best in the world and, historically, have not had stable professional sports leagues with established brand identities to continue on to once their collegiate eligibility is exhausted. A series of UCLA gymnasts with viral floor routine videos would tell you the same thing, and Katelyn Ohashi used her platform to call attention to precisely this issue in a video op-ed produced by Lindsay Crouse at the New York Times.
One thing I always want to mention in the context of NIL and athletes in women’s sports (since there has been a lot of attention paid to the endorsement contract deals going to women, which is also awesome): athletes can now run their own camps. There is a tradition in women’s sports that those of us who have had the privilege to play understand all the work done by the generation who came before us to continue that work to make sure the next generation enjoys an even better experience, more opportunities, and more equitable treatment than we had. Athletes in women’s sports getting to run camps for girls in their home communities and beyond falls right in line with this tradition. It allows women to become part of this greater project and to increase sporting opportunities for girls who might not know they actually love playing lacrosse or might say yes to a learn-to-swim program when the star athlete they’ve admired on T.V. is the person who is teaching it.
That these opportunities had been restricted for generations is exhibit 4372 that the NCAA rules have more to do with policing football athletes and their ability to make money (or be classified as employees) than it does serving communities’ and young people’s educational sporting needs.
Jonathan here. I hope you found that edifying. For those who are interested, I’ve done a podcast off and on for several years with Matt Andrews, on the intersection of sports, history and politics. It’s called Agony of Defeat, which you can find here.
We are lucky Kavanaugh likes coaching girls' basketball, or else the SCOTUS would be liable to strike down Title IX on the originalist argument that when the Constitution was written, the Founding Fathers did not envision girls playing sports.