Ben Flickinger wrote:
 
> Fine, but now women have the opportunities, do we still need Title IX?
>
> I've read several articles about Title IX on the internet, and most of them
> reek of reverse discrimination or reverse sexism.
>
> from http://www.lifetimetv.com/WoSport/stage/RESLIB/html/mythbusting.html
>
> "Title IX requires that male and female athletes receive the same benefits
> of athletic participation:
> .....equipment, uniforms, supplies
> .....access to weight room and training room
> .....equal practice facilities
> .....same size and quality locker rooms and competition facilities
> .....equal access to practice and games during prime time
> .....same quality coaches as boys teams
> .....opportunity to play the same quality opponents
> .....the same awards and awards banquets
> .....have cheerleaders and band perform at girls games too, etc."
 
Lifetime TV doesn't understand what it's talking about.  Title IX is a
lot less
specific in what it mandates, particularly since sports was not the
primary focus of
the legislation when it was enacted.  It mandates that women have equal
access to
sporting opportunities.  This list includes some of the things that will
be looked
at whena determination needs to be made about whether an institution is
in compliance (or making a good faith effort to become so, more often).
As you note, they range from the truly important to the hopelessly
ambiguous to the trivial.  A judge asked to make a ruling will generally
recognize them as such.  However, none of them are absolute; it is
possible to be in compliance while not meeting some of the criteria
here, though the first four are rather important.
 
> I have no problems with the first items on the list, that's what Title IX
> was made for. But I do have a problem with some of them. "Same quality
> coaches?" How can you measure this? I suppose by salary, but what if the
> guy's team goes 35-10 and wins a national title and the girls only 10-30.
> Could they then sue and blame it on unequal coaching? Or better yet, since
> Nebraska's girls basketball team made the NCAA tournament under new coach
> Paul Sanderford, and people have wanted to fire Danny Nee (men's bb coach)
> for years, since he didn't get the men's basketball team to the tournament
> can we claim Title IX for unequal coaching?
 
I've never heard of anyone making a claim using this logic.  Which isn't
to say that it couldn't happen, but I suspect most judges wouldn't take
it seriously unless there was other evidence of non-compliance.
 
> This reminds me alot of a recent lawsuit against movie theaters. Handicapped
> people claim that stadium seating is against the equal treatment law because
> it prevents handicapped people from gaining access to the best seats in the
> theater. Never mind that 97%+ of the people are watching movies from better
> seats and they save handicapped people the best seats in the non-stadium
> seating part(middle of the back row which is pretty close to the middle of
> the theater in), by god if that 3% or less of the population can't have
> access to the same exact stuff then let's sue and claim discrimination.
> Since we can't use an advance, no one can!
 
You don't have to have a reasonable case in order to file a lawsuit.
More often than not, though, you do need one to win.  Without knowing
the outcome of the case, it's tough to decide that the system is
unreasonable.
 
> The thing I hate about quota systems is that they equate use-of-opportunity
> with opportunity itself. here's another analogy. A business opens and hires
> 100 blue collar and 10 white collar jobs. 10 men and 10 women apply for the
> white collar jobs, but 150 men and only 25 women apply for the blue-collar
> jobs. The company can obviously fill the white collared ones to meet their
> quota, but even if they hired all 25 women for the blue-collared jobs they
> still couldn't meet their quota and could be subject to a discrimination
> suit. And this ignores the fact that they may turn down higher qualified men
> to meet that quota (I'm not saying men are necessarily higher qualified, but
> they could be)
 
Again, this is a poor take on how anti-discrimination or
affirmative-action actually works, but it has little relevance to the
list, so I'll let it be.
 
> "When Brown University demoted its women's gymnastics and volleyball teams
> -- along with its men's golf and water polo
> squads -- from varsity to club-varsity status in April, 1991, the affected
> female athletes charged that the University's decision
> discriminated against women, thereby violating Title IX."
>
> They won and Brown is going thru the appeals process (currently up to the
> Supreme Court). Hrm, they cut 2 men's and 2 women's sports. Yep, that's
> definatly discriminating against women when they cut hte same number of
> men's and women's sports. After they originally sued the 2 women's sports
> were added back, and yet they still claimed they were discriminated against
> despite the fact the 2 men's sports weren't re-added. That, to me, is B*** S***.
 
The Brown case is pretty complicated.  Which doesn't mean you'd agree
with it, but it isn't this simple.
 
J. Michael Neal
 
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