Title IX at 50: Remarkable Progress, Much Work to Do

June 23 marks 50 years since Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This U.S. law protects against sex-based discrimination in American schools, colleges, and universities. Its ongoing implementation has significantly reshaped education, school-sponsored athletics, and the working and learning conditions for educators and students. But 50 years on, how close are we to realizing the promise of educational equality “on the basis of sex”? The answer is complicated and uneven.

The primary focus of members of Congress and advocates in the early 1970s was women’s exclusion from graduate education and faculty appointments, and sex bias in curricular materials. Lawmakers, including Representative Patsy Mink (the first women of color elected to Congress), collaborated with burgeoning feminist activists, like scholar Dr. Bernice Sandler (known as “the godmother of Title IX”), to craft a focused and low-profile proposal. It passed Congress with limited debate.

The text of the law is brief — only 37 words plus a few short exemptions — and it included no mention of some areas where it has been most impactful, including school-sponsored athletics. Over the years there has been robust political debate over enacting the law and, at times, tremendous resistance to meaningful and complete implementation. Enforcement remains notoriously incomplete.

On the one hand, Title IX’s success story is undeniable. Since 1972, women’s educational attainment has flourished at every level. Whereas exclusionary quotas suppressed women’s attainment of law and medical degrees to a mere 2% in 1970, recent years have seen women graduating at parity with men. Multiple nationally representative public opinion polls find that both the American public and current student-athletes alike are highly supportive of equity policy, although many lack full information on the details of Title IX.

Transformations in the world of school-sponsored sports are also remarkable. Although inequalities abounded in athletics, advocates for legislation were more broadly focused on crafting civil rights protections for American women in education. Despite the absence of specific reference to athletic programs in the legislation, ensuing debates over policy implementation swiftly converged on women’s glaring exclusion from interscholastic and intercollegiate athletics. The ensuing years were marked by protest, conflict, and legal battles to force athletic departments to change. Collegiate athletic participation among women expanded roughly 12-fold since 1972 through thousands of new teams for American girls and women. Girls’ high school athletic participation has likewise strikingly increased. Roughly half of high school girls in the U.S. now have significant athletic experience compared to one in 12 girls in 1971.

Sports participation has extraordinary lifelong benefits for girls and women. It correlates with greater likelihood of college enrollment, participation in the workforce, and long-term social and physical health. As Title IX altered American education and athletics, so too did it transform the lives of girls and women it enrolled.

Yet equitable implementation across subgroups of beneficiaries remains unfulfilled. Girls and women of color and those from low-income families are much less likely than economically advantaged white women to have access to sports nor to correlated benefits. Although women are now 44% of NCAA athletes, only 14% of those women are BIPOC. Women and girls with disabilities struggle to receive access to equitable physical education, much less competitive athletics.

Transgender women and girls who have competed openly for over a decade under NCAA policy and in many American states are now openly targeted for exclusion from athletic competition by multiple state laws passed since 2020. The exclusion of gender-diverse athletes from youth athletic teams can be devastating to the mental health of queer students. Sports participation can decrease suicidality and depression, and increase the social integration of LGBTQ+ students. Yet many LGBTQ+ youth report fearing harassment by coaches and teammates on the same teams they turn to seeking the positive benefits of sport.

The promise of full equality — and the enforcement of Title IX itself — remains shockingly incomplete in terms of financial support for girls’ and women’s sports, employment for women in coaching and athletic administration, and legal guarantees of participation and scholarship opportunities. A 2022 Women’s Sports Foundation report illustrates striking inequalities: Boys receive over 1 million additional high school athletic opportunities than do girls each year. Eighty-six percent of NCAA institutions offer a disproportionately high number of athletic opportunities to men, rendering 60,000 fewer roster spots in 2019-20 for college women than there should be if Title IX were being fully enforced. That same year, men received $252 million more in athletic scholarship support than did women — which is against policy guidelines. The federal government never enacted Title IX’s enforcement clause, which would gut noncompliant institutions of all federal funding, including for student loans.

And technically, Title IX does not require equal spending. My research with James Druckman for our forthcoming book on the status of gender equality in college sports found that among the largest NCAA athletic programs (i.e., those that compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision), men benefit from 41.5% more annual athletic spending than women, or almost $21.5 million per institution on average, every year.

Yet questions remain as to whether mere improved enforcement will solve inequality. Research, including my own, points to the challenges posed by the means of implementation, specifically the pursuit of equality through sex-segregated athletic opportunities. The strict separation of opportunities and funding for women and men enables these kinds of spending and resource imbalances. While nearly every other historically sex-segregated American institution — including the military, as well as male-exclusive law enforcement agencies and firefighting forces — now pursue gender equality through integration plans, sports remain durably segregated. Our forthcoming book finds that segregation reduces contact among female and male athletes, suppressing the likelihood that men will become strong allies in the fight for equality during and after their competitive careers. We also find that the male-centered and profit-driven organizational culture in college sport suppresses emphatic leadership to fully enforce Title IX under a segregated model. In short, interest groups, scholars, and average Americans must increasingly grapple with the insufficiencies of the current policy model for equality in sports after a half-century of implementation.

Likewise, Title IX’s application to sexual misconduct in schools remains troubled. Sexual assault on college campuses is wildly underreported, and remains often poorly addressed by college administrators, who have received conflicting guidance from policymakers over recent years. Sexual harassment of women faculty remains endemic, particularly in STEM fields. The Government Accountability Office found that bullying and harassment remain significant problems in K-12 education, too. Alarmingly, research indicates that the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic may exacerbate these problems, as well as the push for equality in athletics.

Thus, an evaluation of Title IX at 50 calls for genuine celebration of the successes of policy, alongside sober vigilance and creative visioning to guide future activism. As much as has changed in the first half-century of sex nondiscrimination policy, equally abundant concern remains. We will need to hold these two lessons simultaneously to pursue the future push for gender equality.