Breanna Stewart has twice visited Mexico. She’s traveled to France, Spain and Chile and will visit Puerto Rico this summer. She figures she’s journeyed to almost every state on the East and West coasts, plus numerous stops in gyms across America’s midsection.
The Cicero-North Syracuse senior will attend the University of Connecticut this fall on a full scholarship. She owes all these experiences to basketball.
“Basketball,” she said, “has given me the opportunity to meet so many people and travel to so many places.”
Stewart, 17, has a vague notion of Title IX, the sweeping legislative reform that celebrated its 40th anniversary Saturday. She knows it pertains to “equality,” but to most girls of Stewart’s generation, athletic discrimination based on gender seems a quaint concept relegated to dusty history books.
Since 1972, when Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments that prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender in educational programs and activities, the number of girls who participate in sports has soared to record numbers.
In 1971, boys outnumbered girls 3,666,917 to 294,015 in sports, according to a study by R. Vivian Acosta, Ph.D., and Linda Jean Carpenter. That equates to 1 girl for every 12 boys.
Today, 4,494,406 boys and 3,173,549 girls participate in high school sports, lowering the ratio to 1 girl for every 1.4 boys.
In 1970, our nation’s colleges fielded 2.5 women’s teams per school that accommodated about 16,000 female athletes. Today, colleges field an average of 8.73 women’s teams that encompass about 200,000 female athletes.
But while Baumgartner and others celebrate the achievements of women in sports over the past 40 years, they also acknowledge weaknesses in a law that sometimes fails to dispense justice or fosters unintended consequences.
Men still significantly outnumber women in athletic administration. More men than women coach women’s teams. And girls who live in poor rural or urban areas are less likely to have athletic opportunities than girls who live in more affluent pockets of America.
The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act of 1994 requires that colleges make public detailed reports about athletic participation by gender and disclose how much they spend on men’s and women’s programs. The New York Times last year reported about the deceptive practices of athletic programs that prop up their women’s participation numbers with phantom team members not required to practice or play.
But colleges, at least, are forced by federal law to make some sort of public reckoning. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport, has tried for more than a decade to pass a High School Athletics Accountability Act that would require high schools to publicly report how many boys and girls participate in sports and how much the districts spend to outfit those programs.
Congress, Slaughter said, has been reluctant to embrace that kind of transparency.
“We’ve seen considerable growth in participation,” said Ellen Staurowsky, a Drexel University professor who has studied sports and gender for decades. “But we haven’t necessarily created a culture of Title IX compliance. Having a healthy conversation about how compliance is going to occur — that rarely ever happens.”
Men dominate top positions
Baumgartner likes to occasionally gauge the interest in sports careers among young women. So recently, she asked 14 female SU recruits whether any of them considered coaching or athletic administration.
“They all looked at me like, ‘Oh, we can do that?’” she said. “And I thought to myself, ‘Really?’”
Careers in sports remain an almost exclusive domain of men. Just 20 percent of college athletic directors are female, though those numbers continue to climb.
In 1972, 90 percent of women’s athletic teams were coached by women. Today, more than half the coaches of women’s teams are men.
Tamela Ray, the director of athletics at Auburn High School, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the lopsided proportion of male and female athletics directors. Part of the problem, she said, was that women coaches rarely served on or chaired sectional committees. Those responsibilities enhance the resumes of potential athletics directors but are seldom offered to women, she said.
Both Baumgartner and Ray said the lack of women role models in sports careers likely contributes to the relatively few women who seek jobs in sports professions.
“We’ve talked about it a lot at the senior administrative level and really, it comes down to women have a really difficult time of work/life balance,” Baumgartner said. “They want to raise children, they want to be home for their children. And it’s very, very difficult. It’s unfortunate, whether it’s our mother’s guilt or how we are programmed. But that’s a big piece of the puzzle.”
Women athletics administrators can serve as powerful advocates for girls in sports. April Wertheim, the director of athletics at Corcoran/Fowler, said she attended a meeting years ago when Syracuse high schools were considering adding boys lacrosse. “What about the girls?” Wertheim asked. The next year, she said, lacrosse was introduced in city high schools for both genders.
Problems still exist
Wertheim, like other high school athletics directors in Central New York, compiles data on the number of boys and girls who play sports at her high schools. But the public never sees that information or learns how much each school district allocates to girls and boys sports.
Ray said a Title IX lawsuit against her district would require her to divulge how Auburn spends taxpayers’ money on its athletic teams. But she has never provided that information.
“Nobody’s ever asked,” she said.
Ray and Wertheim believe Section III treats its male and female athletes fairly, that girls and boys have equal access to facilities and uniforms and quality coaching. But that’s not the case across the nation.
Slaughter remembers a congressional hearing assembled in 2003 to defend Title IX. The Rochester congresswoman was struck by the testimonies of gymnast Dominique Dawes and soccer star Mia Hamm, who described the impact sports had made in their lives. But she was unprepared for the vast number of fathers who skipped work to bring their daughters to the hearing and demand they be treated as equitably as their sons.
Still, Slaughter said, her colleagues in Congress remain uncommitted to her quest to make high school athletic programs accountable.
“We’ve had a really hard time passing this,” she said, “because, frankly, my colleagues in the House don’t understand the problem. They don’t believe there is one.”
Benefits extend beyond field
Advocates for women’s sports cite the alarming rise in obesity among American children as further evidence that athletics should be championed for both boys and girls as part of a healthy lifestyle.
But beyond the obvious physical benefits, studies suggest that female athletes profit financially and educationally because of sports. High school female athletes — both blacks and whites — graduate at higher rates than nonathletes, according to a recent government study. And a 2002 survey by Oppenheimer Funds found that 82 percent of female business executives played organized sports after elementary school.
Betsey Stevenson, an economist from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who has extensively studied women in sports, reports that female athletes earn, on average, 7 percent more than female nonathletes once they enter theworkforce.
“Research shows that since Title IX has been passed,” Staurowsky said, “women have risen in the workplace into more responsible positions with higher salaries. That’s an economic impact that can be traced to Title IX.”
Despite 40 years of advancement for women following Title IX , Staurowsky still senses a “legacy of animosity” toward the legislation. Detractors consider Title IX a quota system that has sacrificed athletic opportunities for men to genuflect to the politically correct.
The number of boys in wrestling, in particular, has decreased significantly since the passage of Title IX, but Staurowsky said participation data suggests boys’ interests have shifted to lacrosse and football, two sports boys play in increasing numbers. Advocates for women’s sports point out that participation rates for both boys and girls have risen in the 40 years since Title IX was enacted.
Staurowsky, too, worries about whether new generations of athletes and administrators fully understand how the legislation works. She conducted a recent study of nearly 1,100 male and female college coaches and discovered that 82 percent of the respondents had never been taught basic tenets of Title IX.
When Section III voted to move girls’ volleyball from the winter season to the fall, Wertheim, the athletics director at Corcoran/Fowler, met with her volleyball players to explain that the shift would allow them to participate in regional and state competitions that take place in the fall. That, she told them, would enable more college coaches to watch them play during the fertile recruiting period.
During that meeting, she asked whether any of the girls were aware of Title IX. None of them, she said, “had a clue.”
“Some of your parents and grandparents didn’t have the opportunities you have,” Wertheim told them. “If you don’t know the history, I don’t know if you can appreciate how far we’ve come.”
Donna Ditota can be reached at 470-2208 or firstname.lastname@example.org.