Amend Title IX

We believe that Title IX, despite being a well-intentioned effort to promote equality, has become an ineffective and unjust rule in its current form. As participants, coaches, and/or concerned fans of collegiate athletics, we believe that Title IX currently does more harm than good and should be heavily modified in its treatment/interpretation regarding collegiate athletics.

We believe that Title IX (officially the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act), originally created to improve gender equity in education, was beneficial to womens sports at the collegiate level for some time. However, currently, the interpretation of Title IX is causing more gender inequality than it is preventing.

We believe that it is unjust to require an equal number of opportunities for men and women when womens sports have no counterpart to football, which is allotted up to 85 scholarships for Division I programs. We believe that, in many cases, this has led to a massive disparity in which many schools offer as many as three more sports for women than for men. Additionally, within sports offered to both men and women, this has led to disparity; for example, the NCAA allows 18 full scholarships to be given to a Division I womens track and field team, but only 12.6 scholarships to a mens T&F team. We believe that this is unequal and unjust.

We believe that the current interpretation of Title IX has caused many schools to cut mens varsity athletic programs due to lack of funding, rather than create additional womens sports. We believe that this in no way promotes gender equity and goes against the original intentions of Title IX.

We believe that Title IX needs to be rewritten, amended, and/or reinterpreted in regards to collegiate athletics, in a way that continues to promote gender equity but which does not incentivize harming mens programs rather than improving womens. We suggest, for example, treating sports offered to both men and women equally, striving for an equal number of sports rather than scholarships offered, and removing/heavily modifying the first prong compliance test, which requires participation by gender to be proportional to enrollement. These and other changes would allow the law to protect women's opportunities in college athletics without limiting men's, and would promote Title IX's goal of equal opportunity.