Is it fair to eliminate sports opportunities for men to comply with Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs or activities at schools and colleges that receive federal funds?
Schools often cite insufficient finances to add more sports opportunities for women, cut a men's non-revenue sport and use these funds to start a new women's team. When alumni and students complain, the institution blames the law and female athletes.
The real problem can be simply described. Your first two children are boys. You give them everything. Their rooms are palaces of athletic privilege. They go to two or three sport camps every summer. They play Little League Baseball, soccer and Pop Warner football. One becomes an outstanding football player, and the other excels in tennis. Then, you have another child, a girl, and your income doesn't change. She says, "Mom, Dad, I want to play sports." What are your options?
Option A: Kill your last born son (i.e., drop the men's tennis team) so you still have only two children to provide for.
Option B: Tell your daughter she can't have the same privileges as her brothers. Tell her she can't go to a summer sports camp unless she earns her own money and pays for it herself.
Option C: Gather the family around the kitchen table and explain to your children that your daughter is just as important as your sons. You don't have the dollars to provide the same privileges for your daughter as you did for your sons ...but you are going to try your best to give all of your children every opportunity to participate in sports. Everyone sacrifices, and each child makes do with a smaller piece of the pie because now there are three (the Title IX situation).
The solution is Option C. Institutions that are dropping men's teams are choosing Option A not because of Title IX but because they are being terrible parents (educational leaders). The answer to Title IX is very simple: If revenues don't increase, then everyone must make do with a smaller piece of the budget pie.
Tightening a sport's budget will not cause this sport business to fail. Commercial entities initiate such cost cuts every day to eliminate fat, increase profit margins and satisfy stockholders.
Second, and more important, there can never be an economic justification for discrimination. No one should ever be permitted to say, "I can't comply with the law because I can't afford it."
Using an employment discrimination example, the analogy would be that reducing the salaries of all employees is the preferred method of generating funds in an effort to increase salaries for the group that has historically experienced discrimination. This never happens. Rather, the salaries of the disadvantaged gender or individuals are always raised to the level of the advantaged group. As in the area of salary discrimination, the goal should be to bring the treatment of the group experiencing discrimination up to the level of the group that has received fair treatment, not to bring male athletes in minor sports down to the level of female athletes who simply were not provided with opportunities to play.
Even worse, when an institution eliminates a men's team in the name of Title IX, such action usually results in the development of destructive acrimony. Alumni of the dropped men's sport get upset. Gains for the underrepresented group come grudgingly and at a high cost to the previously advantaged group.
The last alternative should be cutting opportunities for students to participate in an educational activity. Other solutions that should be considered, in order of preference, are:
1. Raising new revenues. Gender equity can be used as an opportunity to raise new funds in much the same way as the need for a new building is used to initiate a capital campaign. But it is essential that there be a positive spin on alumni solicitations for this purpose like adding one or two dollars to the current price of all sport tickets "so our daughters will have an equal chance to play" and other similarly creative revenue solutions.
2. Reducing excess expenditures on the most expensive men's sports and using the savings to expand opportunities and treatment for the underrepresented gender. Such reductions include: provision of hotel rooms the night before home contests, ordering new uniforms less frequently, and reducing the distance traveled for non-conference competition by selecting others as competitive opponents in closer geographic proximity.
3. Athletic conference cost-saving. The conference can adopt across-the-board mandated cost reductions that will assist all schools in saving funds while ensuring that the competitive playing field remains level (travel squad limits, adding the same sports for the underrepresented gender at the same time in order to ensure competition within a reasonable geographic area, etc.).
4. Internal across-the-board budget reductions. All sports can be asked to cut their budgets by a fixed percentage, thereby allowing each sport to choose the way it might least be affected.
5. Moving to a lower competitive division. At the college level, Division I programs can move to Division I-AA or Division II competition, thereby reducing scholarship and other expenses.
6. Using tuition waiver savings to fund gender equity. States can initiate legislation that provides for waiver of higher education tuition for athletic scholarships to members of the underrepresented gender, similar to the law adopted by the state of Washington. This legislation mandates the use of these scholarship savings to expand opportunities for the underrepresented gender. Such initiatives recognize that correcting gender inequities is an institutional obligation, not just an athletic department issue.
Unfortunately, at most institutions, it is easier for a college president to cut wrestling or men's gymnastics than to deal with the politics of reducing the football or men's basketball budgets. Simply put, educational leaders need more guts to step up and do the right thing.
Donna Lopiano is executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation.
