How a Policy Interpretation turned Title IX against itself
When Title IX was passed in 1972, it promised to provide men and women with equal access to opportunities like scholarships, athletic programs, and extracurriculars. It was a beacon of progress in the fight for gender equality and transformational for women’s athletics.
It’s perplexing, then, that the number of NCAA men’s gymnastics teams has dwindled from over 100 to a measly 12 since the early 1980s. The number of NCAA Division I men’s wrestling programs has shrunk from 150 to 79. Men’s gymnastics, tennis, and indoor track and field teams have been cut entirely from the University of Minnesota.
Why has a government policy that promised to expand opportunity seemingly restricted it?
The answer lies not in Title IX itself but in the Department of Education’s 1979 “Policy Interpretation” of it, which hoped to clarify how Title IX applied specifically to intercollegiate athletics.
Under the Policy Interpretation, a school can demonstrate compliance by satisfying one of three prongs: (1) showing that athletic participation is substantially proportionate to the student body’s ratio of male and female students, (2) demonstrating a history and continuing practice of expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex, or (3) showing that the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex are fully and effectively accommodated.
The Policy Interpretation twisted an anti-discrimination statute into one that demanded sex-based quotas. This week, Pacific Legal Foundation filed a petition to repeal the three-part test alongside the American Sports Council, a national, multisport coalition devoted to the preservation of collegiate sports.
What’s wrong with proportionality?
To achieve proportionality, the first prong of the Policy Interpretation’s criteria, schools have two options: add women’s teams or cut men’s teams.
Pressure to comply with the Policy Interpretation “has led to schools singling out the overrepresented sex and reducing opportunities for members of that group—rather than increasing opportunities for the underrepresented sex,” PLF’s petition explains.
It’s an unfortunate but predictable outcome; adding teams is expensive. It requires coaches, scholarships, facilities, travel budgets, equipment, and administrative support—all ongoing costs. This comes at a time when schools are increasingly devoting resources to their name, image, and likeness programs in order to boost recruiting in revenue-generating sports, like football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball.
There’s also a numbers problem. Football rosters are enormous, as are their coaching staffs. Football generates a good chunk of revenue for most Division I schools and accounts for a significant portion of male participation numbers. At the same time, it often funds the very programs required to balance it out—subsidizing the majority of other men’s and women’s sports programs through ticket sales, alumni donations, and media deals, while also increasing institutional visibility. In short, football is untouchable; cutting it would be financially and culturally catastrophic.
That means the programs continuously on the chopping block are smaller men’s sports, and some women’s teams, with less visibility and weaker donor bases: wrestling, gymnastics, swimming, track and field, cross country, rowing, tennis. These teams generally lack the institutional leverage to protect themselves. Cutting them reduces the total number of male athletes so schools can comply with the Policy Interpretation without building out women’s teams solely to hit a quota and not necessarily to meet student demand.
The ripple effects extend beyond campus. Many of the sports cut are Olympic sports, and as college programs disappear, so do the feeder systems that develop the next generation of American Olympic athletes.
But as PLF’s petition explains, “Singling out members of one sex and limiting their opportunities does not remedy discrimination against members of the opposite sex.”
A framework frozen in 1972
Title IX was enacted to address real, systemic inequalities, but more than 50 years later, the enforcement framework has failed to evolve with the landscape it governs.
In 1972, when Title IX became law, women’s sports garnered just 2% of university spending on athletics, and athletic scholarships for women were virtually nonexistent. There were just over 300,000 college and high school female athletes in the U.S.
Forty years later, that number had risen to over 3 million. In the 2019-20 school year, women represented 44% of college athletes in the U.S.
Still, any remaining gap between enrollment and participation rates continues to be treated as presumptive evidence of discrimination—despite the fact that disparities can result from any number of factors, including individual choice. And when women are excelling across the board in higher education, it seems fairly obvious that they don’t need a sex-based quota to keep them on sports teams.
The imbalances that persist today are more about the gap between high-revenue sports and everyone else, but Title IX’s legal framework only captures that problem when it falls along gender lines. Modernizing the framework’s enforcement means shifting the focus from how many athletes a school counts on its rosters to how it actually treats the ones it has—regardless of whether their sport fills a stadium. The Policy Interpretation doesn’t get us there.
Title IX’s promise was straightforward: No one should be denied opportunity because of their sex. More than 50 years later, that promise remains worth defending. But the 1979 Policy Interpretation has distorted it beyond recognition, replacing the pursuit of equal access with a rigid numbers game that often punishes male athletes rather than increasing opportunities across the board.
Repealing the 1979 Policy Interpretation means restoring Title IX’s promise of equal access—for everyone.
