Supporters of Title IX such as the National Coalition for Women and Girls In Sports regularly claim that “loss of male collegiate athletic participation opportunities is a myth.”
Tell that to the University of Delaware, which announced in January:
that it is downgrading its men’s cross country and outdoor track and field teams from varsity to club status — as part of an effort to comply with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The university’s announcement said that, in the past, it has sought to comply with Title IX by expanding women’s athletic options, but that budget realities make it impossible to add more women’s teams. Men’s teams needed to be eliminated because the university now plans to demonstrate compliance with Title IX by meeting a proportionality test under which an institution should have roughly the same percentage of female undergraduates and female athletes. Currently, 58 percent of the university’s undergraduates are female, while only 51 percent of athletes are. After the two teams are eliminated, 57 percent of athletes will be female.
To the naked, untrained eye the “proportionality test” may look like a quota, but fortunately we have the NCWGE to assure us that’s not the case:
Does the three-part test establish quotas?
No. The three-part test [which includes the “proportionality test” as “Prong One”] imposes no numerical requirement even remotely analogous to quotas. Because athletic teams are gender-segregated, individual educational institutions must decide how many athletic opportunities they will allocate to each sex. Thus, schools are required to make gender-conscious decisions related to allocation of opportunities. Far from imposing quotas, the three-part test is merely a measurement, a benchmark for determining whether schools distribute sex-segregated athletic participation opportunities fairly. Courts have repeatedly recognized that the three-part test in no way creates quotas.
So a quota is not a quota. What would we do without the NCWGE and those “Courts” to force us to admire the emperor’s new clothes?
