Fair Play for Women proposed

Three U.S. Congresswomen and a senator proposed the Fair Play for Women Act to address ongoing inequities in school athletics 50 years after Title IX outlawed such discrimination. The legislation would make a number of significant changes. In a nutshell: It gives the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights a new enforcement tool besides the “nuclear option” of withholding all federal funds from a school that’s violating Title IX — a punishment so severe it’s never been used. The Fair Play for Women Act would allow the government to fine schools who discriminate in athletics. Elementary and high schools […]

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Title IX showdown on abortion

A recent Supreme Court ruling clashed with existing laws, producing a Title IX showdown on abortion of sorts in schools, colleges, and universities. The U.S. Department of Education reminded educational institutions that Title IX protects students, faculty, and staff against discrimination based on pregnancy and related conditions, including the termination of pregnancy. Officials released the three-page fact sheet 100 days after the Supreme Court canceled the constitutional right to an abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in a ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Title IX has protected abortion as an integral part […]

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Where are “protectors” of women’s sports now?

The self-designated “protectors” of women’s sports who loudly oppose allowing a few transgender girls and women to compete remain oddly silent about practices that unfairly give hundreds of women’s playing slots to cisgender men year after year after year. An excellent USA Today article this week exposed some of the ways that college athletics programs routinely shortchange women’s teams. Three big ones: counting men who practice with women’s teams as women, double-counting women athletes, and packing so many women onto a team that most never get a chance to play, instead of creating more teams for women. For example, I […]

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Potential big deal for Title IX lawsuits

A little-noticed legal ruling this week could be a big deal for Title IX lawsuits going forward. If I’m reading this right, colleges and universities could be held accountable not only for cases in which they were deliberately indifferent to reports of sexual harassment and assault after they happened. They could also be held accountable for inadequate management of campus sexual violence before the next attacks occur because their actions (or lack of them) increased the risk for more victims, violating Title IX. What does that look like in real life? The ruling from a three-judge Appeals Court panel gave […]

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Abortion controversy altered Title IX history

The leaked draft Supreme Court decision that could cancel abortion rights dominated headlines this week, but earlier abortion controversy altered Title IX history in ways that are worth remembering. Read more about this in my article in The Washington Post Made by History section today. Here’s a bit more detail to that story: When a 1984 Supreme Court decision in Grove City College v Bell narrowed the application of Title IX and other civil rights laws in education, enforcement stalled. Several colleges cut women’s sports teams because they no longer had to provide equal chances to play. The Office for Civil Rights dropped some investigations […]

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Title IX to cover queer, transgender people

Revisions to Title IX’s regulations that are expected to be proposed by the White House in April will affirm explicitly for the first time that Title IX’s protections cover queer and transgender people. The regulations’ prohibition of sex discrimination in education will include discrimination based on “sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identify,” the Washington Post reported. Backing up the supportive stance of the Biden Administration, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona posted a 2021 video conversation with his cousin Alex Cardona, a young transgender man, in which the Secretary says, “I […]

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Congress mandates surveys on sexual violence

Once again the federal Education Department is stepping in to do something that all colleges should have done but many haven’t — surveys about sexual violence on campus. Hooray for the feds. Under a provision tucked into a 3,000-page Congressional bill to fund the federal government for six months, the Education Department will develop an online survey to measure students’ experiences with sexual harassment and assault, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Any college receiving federal funds will be required to conduct the campus-climate survey every two years, and the Education Department will publish aggregate results. The legislation also calls […]

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Intersectional identities influence Title IX

Title IX has helped millions of people — especially girls and women — deal with sex discrimination in education. You know who it hasn’t helped as much? Girls and women of color or who are ethnic minorities, disabled, immigrants, old, queer, transgender, poor, or have other intersecting identities that increase the likelihood they will be discriminated against. In this recent video interview with Andrea L. Pino-Silva, co-founder of End Rape on Campus, we talked about some of the ways that intersectionality manifests in education, in Title IX activism, and in our lives: Since Prof. Kimberle Crenshaw championed the concept of […]

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Bayh fathered Title IX, inspired by Marvella

Former Senator Birch Bayh, the father of Title IX, died on March 14, 2019, marking the end of an era. His life shows us how people can break free from prejudices of their generation yet simultaneously remain trapped by them. It’s a humbling truth we all share, like it or not. Bayh is the last of the major players in Title IX’s creation to leave this earth. Rep. Edith Green, the mother and primary author of Title IX, died in 1987 without even a mention of Title IX in her obituary (though, to be fair, Title IX was decimated at […]

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Speak your mind on DeVos and Title IX

We’re at a pivotal moment in Title IX history. Not since 1975 has the Department of Education changed the regulations governing Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. The Trump Administration now is going all-out to see that its definition of sex discrimination becomes the law of the land and to limit how schools are allowed to respond to it. Women’s advocates are fighting back, but Education Secretary Betsy DeVos gave the public only until Jan. 29, 2019 to submit comments for or against her new Title IX rules. Groups like Know Your IX, End Rape on […]

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Weaponizing Title IX serves politics

What happens on campus with Title IX spills over into broader society and vice versa. It’s always been thus in a general way but lately we’ve seen different groups weaponizing Title IX to fight off-campus battles. Social change movements always have influenced Title IX’s use on campus. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT rights movement, and the movement against sexual violence contributed to Title IX’s creation and helped give women and men the self-agency to use Title IX as a tool for progress. Title IX’s application then changed not only campus life but society outside of academia. […]

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Get ready for more Title IX fireworks

Happy 2018! In the new year, the backlash against Title IX will make more headlines as the Trump Administration continues to change regulations dealing with sex discrimination in education. Advocates for girls and women will push back and eventually move society two steps forward for every step back. We’ve seen this before, many times. Let’s take a look at the challenges that Title IX faced and overcame at this point in previous decades. It’s been a wild ride toward equity in education. The fun isn’t done. This timeline leaves out a lot, yet you can see patterns and progress: 1968 […]

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Title IX critics huddle up for special treatment

When I read complaints that Title IX enforcement goes too far in dealing with sexual assault on campus, I think of football. Not because this topic is a political football being tossed around in the court of public opinion, though there’s that. In the history of Title IX, today’s complainers of government “overreach” in dealing with sexual assaults have a lot in common with college football teams and other men’s sports, but especially football. What they want, it seems, is for people to realize that they’re special, and that they deserve special rules. The government more than once has bent over backwards […]

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Happy birthday, Title IX! (from some of us)

Title IX is 45 years old this month! Imagine having your logic, your morality, and even your right to exist constantly being questioned for 45 years — essentially, what most women encounter in overt or subtle ways in our sexist society. You’d be tired of this nonsense by now, right? That’s what Title IX has faced since Congress passed it and President Nixon signed it on June 23, 1972. Fortunately, enough people understand the need to prohibit sex discrimination in education and have benefited from Title IX, giving this law the strength to persist. Compare the muscles and skills of today’s female […]

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Nevertheless, she persisted

Part of the fun of researching Title IX history is seeing the chain of women’s activism linking so many “foremother” feminists in politics with bad-ass female public servants of today, backed by the wider women’s movement. Progress is never simple; they lobbied, persuaded, bargained, defied, and often had to trust that their efforts would cumulate into unstoppable momentum toward equity. “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the media in February, 2017 after he used an arcane Senate rule to cut off Sen. Elizabeth Warren mid-speech. Warren had been reading a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott […]

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Senators should ask DeVos about Title IX

The U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee has at least another week to consider what it will ask Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos since it delayed her nomination hearing from Jan. 11th to next Wednesday, Jan. 18. My suggestion: Ask her about Title IX. Does she understand that it’s a civil law operating under civil procedures, not criminal ones? Does she agree that Title IX is important for elementary and secondary schools as well as higher educational institutions? Is she aware that it’s about so much more than the hot-button issues of sports or sexual assault or transgender bathrooms? For the […]

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Journalists ignore women’s sports

I saw ghosts in October. I could sense that female athletes were out there being sportsy and all, but in my local newspaper mostly they were invisible. I decided, on an irritated whim, to monitor the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of women’s sports for one month and write a Letter to the Editor each day, a horrifying exercise that left me cursing the Chronicle. Jump to the Oct. 31 letter below for a recap and the curse. Or follow along in these excerpts: Oct. 1: 10 pages, 22 stories, 13 photos. Women = 2 sentences. Nothing on the two exciting WNBA […]

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Running for president, long before Hillary

History turns a page this week when Hillary Clinton becomes the first female candidate for U.S. President to be nominated by a major political party. In the spirit of this blog’s weaving of historical and contemporary threads, you might enjoy The Guardian’s article on Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President, or The Smithsonian’s article on the same topic. Many of the foremothers of Title IX who have been profiled on this blog are contemporaries of Sen. Clinton and entered government service in some fashion in the 1960s and 1970s. See this earlier post for a fun photo […]

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Lobbyists, Congressional staff influenced Title IX

[Videos feature Judy Norrell, former lobbyist for the League of Women Voters, and Barbara Dixon, former staff person for Sen. Birch Bayh.] Title IX wasn’t just an act of Congress, nor did it come simply from the demands of women’s activist organizations. There’s plenty of overlap between insiders and outsiders in Washington, D.C. and varying degrees of insider- or outsider-ness depending on the person and the situation. Women were small in number compared with men working in the nation’s capitol in the 1970s, which made it easier, in some ways, to find each other and collaborate as both insiders and outsiders. Female […]

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