Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2021

Spring 2021

The Title IX Revolution

Women have always competed in athletics, but before the watershed regulations that applied Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1972 to college sports, women played a minor part in intercollegiate programs.

The notion that women only discovered athletic competition after Title IX is of course inaccurate as women have always been participants in organized sports whenever the opportunity arose, whether track and field and other Olympic events, tennis, field hockey, basketball, or other competitions. Certainly the men who controlled and managed the college sports franchises did not see women's sports as important, and often the same social, political, and economic structures that restricted women's access to other fields of work and competition applied to sports. Nonetheless, the existence of active women's competitions in a variety of sports is reflected in the growth of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). This group emerged in 1971 from the development of women's collegiate programs in the 1950s and 1960s and provided a structure for competition and standardized rules for women's sports.

The NCAA, however, showed little interest in women's sports until the late 1970s. Eventually, with the continued rise of interest in women's sports, the clear popularity of the women's basketball tournament, and especially the enforcement in the 1980s of requirements of the Title IX Amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1972, the NCAA began to sponsor championships for women. By 1982 with the advent of the Division I NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament, the AIAW lost control of women's sports to the NCAA.

While many lament the demise of the AIAW, the transition to the NCAA represented the emergence of women's sports as a major enterprise within intercollegiate athletics. Although we might have hoped that the college athletics would welcome the participation of women in ever larger numbers, university leaders, athletic interests in college sports, and the NCAA resisted, opposed, and in many cases resented the necessity of providing opportunities for women.

The fight over equity for women in intercollegiate athletics is by no means over, and the controversy highlights many important features of the intercollegiate sports world. The first of these, which we have emphasized before, is that sports simplifies complicated issues because everything is counted and measured. We can always see how many women and men receive scholarships for sports, we can see how many women and men play on teams, and we can see how many games they play. We can count the number of seats in the stadium, the number of days of practice, the number of assistant coaches in each sport, and the salaries and bonuses of the coaches. We can see if the university provides a pep band for men's and women's basketball games, whether the media guides for men and women are equivalent, and whether the travel arrangements for men and women match.

Change of this kind often creates bitter controversy, and while popular support for the Title IX revolution remains quite strong, some anti-Title IX sentiment related to college sports continues to exist. It appears in resistance to expanding scholarship opportunities for women, in controversies over the rising cost of intercollegiate athletics, and in the discussions about which individual sports should be included in an institution's athletic program.

Opportunity for Women and Sports Teams

Among the many confusions that surround the rise of women's participation in sports is the belief that gender equity in sports is about teams and the sports they compete in. However, opportunity is always individual, whether expressed as a chance to enter college or play on an intercollegiate athletic team and receive a sports scholarship. While fans focus on the teams and the competitions, the university is about the education of individual students. If we provide opportunities for individual men students and not for individual women students, whatever the activity whether an academic program or a sports competition, then we violate the equal opportunity that is a requirement of the law and a fundamental tenet of fairness.

College sports, highly regulated and quantified as it is, makes it easy to count the number of opportunities for men and women and determine whether the distribution of opportunities is reasonably equal. Because universities provide 85 scholarships for men in Football Bowl Subdivision football programs, they must find 85 equivalent opportunities for women. Since no woman's sports team requires this number of participants, it takes more women's sports teams to match the scholarships provided men in football. As a consequence, we now have more women's sports teams than men's sports teams, but still in most universities, more men than women receive sports scholarships and participate in intercollegiate athletics.

In working towards this balance since 1972 and more seriously since the mid-1980s, universities have eliminated some men's sports, because so many men's scholarships belonged to football, and added women's sports to try to give women close to the same number of opportunities as men. Today, the data show a tremendous growth in the number of women participating in sports at all levels from secondary schools through college. The number of men, always high, has remained high and grown slightly over the years. Today, there are still more men participating with scholarships than women, although the gap, compared to earlier years, is significantly narrower.

Unfulfilled Expectations for Women's Opportunities in Sports

These changes reflect, as do most changes in sports, the social and economic expectations of the society at large. Professions of all kinds from law to medicine, from business to the skilled trades have seen more and more women gaining the education, skills, and success previously reserved for men. This increase in equality of opportunity is of course reflected in sports, and while it may have taken some conflict and legal actions to move universities into closer compliance with the law, the change in college sports from pre-1972 to today is quite remarkable. Women's intercollegiate sports has gained audiences, and levels of performance unanticipated by the male-dominated leadership of prior years, and this progress is likely to continue.

If participation has grown, some areas of sports, both in college and the professional leagues, remain almost entirely male. Of course football, with its outsize visibility and revenue is the most obvious example, but the management of sports as well, from coaching to front office administrators, is still primarily a white male-controlled occupation.

In addition, one of the unanticipated side effects of the rise of successful women's sports teams in college has been a decline in the number of women coaching these teams. When it became important to have women's teams competing it also became important for them to win, and many male assistant coaches or coaches of men's teams at lesser institutions but with extensive experience found good career opportunities in coaching a woman’s team, and with their experience, drive it to victory. Today, the percentage of women coaches leading women's teams is significantly lower than it was in earlier years before the Title IX revolution took hold.

All of this tells us that the Title IX revolution, while having dramatic effects in sports as it did everywhere else in American society, has not yet resolved all the issues of equal opportunity. Many circumstances affect the development of the administrative and coaching ranks in college, but discrimination is clearly one of them. There is yet much to do before we can be convinced that the opportunities for women in sports are equivalent to those of their male colleagues.