A New Attack on Women's Sports

[Conservativesux]

The New York Times

EDITORIAL

A New Attack on Women's Sports

Published: April 12, 2005

The Bush administration has mounted a surreptitious new attack on Title IX, the 33-year-old law that has exponentially expanded the participation of girls and women in sports.

Last month, a memo went up on an Education Department Web site that was billed as a "clarification" of Title IX regulations. But the memo amounted to a major weakening of the criteria used to determine compliance with the rule that all schools receiving public funds provide equal sports opportunities for men and women.


Under the new guidelines, on campuses where the proportion of female athletes falls notably below the proportion of women in the student body, and sports programs for women are not expanding, a college will still be able to show it is "fully and effectively" obeying the law by doing an online survey that shows women have no unmet sports interests. The department says that if the rate of response is low - as it is with most such surveys - that will be interpreted as a lack of interest.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/opinion/12tue2.html?incamp=article_popular_5

[LiberalVoice]

1. Women don't need sports anyway...

shouldn't they be learning how to cook? :eyes:

[rodeodance]

2. this reasoning is an abuse of scientific reserach results. If survery

response it low-it means that the 'result/findings' are not to be trusted. It has NOTHING to do with the the WH illogical reasoning-(that they are not interested).

[Skittles]

3. or better yet

titillating men as cheerleaders :puke:

[Igel]

4. I don't think that the survey they plan to use is sufficient to gauge

interest.

But having been involved in discussions about this at UCLA in student government back in the '90s--one year living in the dorm on the interdormitory council, the next year on various campus committees, the the following two years as stu-gov officer, I've seen the recruitment activities and programs for intramural and extramural sports. I've seen the numbers at UCLA, both of dollars, bodies, and events.

The old interpretation of the rules was that progress towards equal numbers of bodies and dollars in men's and women's sports had to be shown, or that either equality of money or of bodies was sufficient. ("Equality" was based on M/F percentage of the overall student body.) The new interpretation was that all the rules had to be met simultaneously. Budget magic and cancelling men's intermural teams had been enough for budget equality, but the numbers of bodies weren't equal. The new interpretation was to force schools to make the effort to equalize participation: it assumed equal interest, and concluded that the only reason equality wasn't met was institutional lethargy or discrimination. I think that assumption was based on flawed ideology, not on any sound data.

For women, each year they put up posters around campus and in the buildings, they put ads in the student paper, they had informational meetings, they visited the dorms. They scheduled additional tryout times; they scheduled the most convenient game times for women. For men, they just announced when tryouts were. Game times fell when they fell.

Then each year they turned away men, cancelled proposed men's intramural teams because the numbers of men exceeded the numbers of women. I really don't think the interest in sports was equal; it may eventually get there, it may even be there now, I've been away from UCLA "politics" for years now, but somebody should develop and implement the methods to track interest. And then make sure opportunities are sufficient.