What is being said in the text? The dominant principle in modern antidiscrimination law is that all
persons should be treated as individuals, without reference to their status as
members of a social group. In American law, this translates into a principle of
color blindness when we’re speaking about racial equality and gender blindness when the focus is on discrimination against women. Civil rights laws
on workplace equality, for example, require employers to use gender-neutral
hiring criteria, with few exceptions. Once Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 went into effect, employers could no longer advertise positions for
“women’s jobs” or “men’s jobs.” Instead, the law requires employers to consider men and women together for the same positions—unless the job fits
into a narrow category of exceptions where sex is a “bona fide occupational
qualification” for performing the job. Men have an equal right to be considered for secretarial positions, just as women can compete for jobs in law
enforcement. Whether or not such gender-blind criteria actually produce a
diverse mix of men and women throughout the workforce is not the law’s
primary concern. Title VII is a quintessentially liberal feminist law, promising a gender-neutral process, not equal results.
Title IX’s approach is markedly different from this baseline. As any college
or high school sports fan knows, gender blindness is not the rule in competitive sports. Men and women generally do not compete against each other for
the same sports opportunities. Title IX left the sex-separate structure of sports
largely intact and opted for more substantive measures of equal opportunity
rather than a rule of gender blindness. Where Title IX has had the greatest
impact, in high school and college varsity sports participation, separation by
sex is the rule rather than the exception. Title IX’s allowance for sex separation has facilitated a legal approach that emphasizes results over process and
actual opportunities for girls and women over a more formal gender neutrality. However, the law also leaves intact a structure in which women’s sports
are too often marginalized as secondary to men’s games, a poor stepsister to
the “real” varsity programs.The question of how to structure sport so that it fully includes and values
women raises what is known among feminist legal scholars as the dilemma of
difference. If women as a group are not similarly situated to men with respect
to sports as they are currently played, how can sex-discrimination law best
secure equality? Should it ignore gender differences, promote a gender-blind
structure, and call it equality if schools have open tryouts for each sport? In
this model, the best athlete, male or female, would make the team with no
special dispensation for an athlete’s sex. Alternatively, should Title IX take a
gender-conscious approach that acknowledges gender difference and makes
sure that women have enough opportunities to play sports compared to the
number of men’s opportunities?
The Dilemma: Separation or Integration?
Neither model is costless. Shifting to a framework that offers coed opportunities for all athletes with no attention to gender could potentially wipe
out the biggest gains Title IX has produced: the burgeoning numbers of girls
and women who participate in competitive school sports. With genderblind team selection and competition, the majority of female athletes could
well be relegated to second-tier teams or club and intramural games with
only token representation at the varsity level. For many girls and women,
such a shift would offer fewer paths to the success and status that so many
female athletes have achieved under Title IX. Sport as a path to empowerment would become much narrower for most women, if not closed off completely. Although some individual female athletes might be better off with
coed teams because of their ability to excel in competition with male athletes, women as a group would likely face diminished opportunities to play
sports at the most elite levels.
On the other hand, accommodating gender difference has its costs, too.
It reinforces an ideology that has historically been used to justify the outright denial of sports opportunities to women and, more recently, to place
a lower value on women’s sports. Having separate men’s and women’s teams
risks sending the message that women are inherently lesser athletes. The
existence of sex-segregated programs risks identifying female athletes as the
second-class citizens of sport. It also sacrifices whatever benefits might be
gained by having men and women, and boys and girls, compete with and
against one another and the potential transformation in gender relations that
might result. As the feminist sport historian Jennifer Hargreaves explains
the dilemma, separatism can increase women’s control over sport, mobilize women to fight for equal resources, and enable them to participate in sports
free from male domination, but it also re-creates social gender divisions and
can exaggerate sexism, with the message that biological sex, rather than culture, defines athleticism.1
This is the classic dilemma of difference, leaving advocates for gender
equality damned if they ignore gender and damned if they don’t. Title IX
negotiates this terrain with a flexible and pragmatic approach. As a starting
point, Title IX allows schools to offer separate competitive teams for men and
women. But this baseline can be altered in narrow circumstances recognized
by Title IX and, in some cases, the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.
The result is that individual athletes have a right to try out for an oppositesex team, but only if they meet certain criteria—criteria that strongly favor
tryout rights for women over those for men. In this legal regime, gender separation is the norm, integration the exception.
This chapter explores how Title IX navigates the tricky terrain of gender separation and assimilation in sports. It concludes that, although critiques of sex
segregation in sport deserve our attention, Title IX has done a relatively good
job of forging a pragmatic approach to structuring sports opportunities for
girls and women. In forsaking gender blindness for a more gender-conscious,
result-oriented model, Title IX has chosen substantive equality over formal
equality. This choice has created the potential for expanding girls’ and women’s
sports participation and inciting broad-based cultural transformation in society’s response to female athletes and to women’s roles more generally.
The Development of Title IX’s Approach to Sex Equality in Sports
Title IX emerged from a broader social movement seeking the recognition and vindication of women’s rights. After Congress passed Title VII of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned workplace discrimination on the
basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, women’s rights advocates
turned their attention to widespread practices of discrimination against girls
and women in education. Early drafts of what would become Title IX proposed simply adding “sex” to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which
bans race discrimination in all federally funded programs, including education programs. However, in response to extensive testimony in Congress
specifically focused on sex discrimination in education, the proposal was
redrafted and ultimately enacted as separate legislation.
Congressional hearings on the bill barely mentioned sports, focusing
instead on the discrimination women faced in gaining admission to collegeand graduate school. At the time, many universities, if they allowed women
in graduate programs at all, had quotas limiting the number of places they
could fill. The theory was that women were likely to marry and stay home to
raise children and should not take slots away from men, who would make
better use of their degree.2
To the extent that the topic of sports came up at
all in these hearings, it was raised by proponents of Title IX to allay fears
that the law would go too far in radically altering male turf. Senator Birch
Bayh of Indiana, a leading sponsor of the legislation, mentioned sports only
twice during the hearings. The first time was to provide reassurance that the
law would not mandate coed football. Senator Peter Dominick of Colorado
retorted that he would have had much more fun playing football if it had
been coed, prompting chuckles from the Senate gallery. The only other time
the subject was mentioned was to reassure members of Congress that Title
IX would not require coed locker rooms and would allow personal privacy
to be preserved.3
Whatever ambivalence surrounding the law’s coverage of
sports was present at the time was overshadowed by a general consensus on
the need to expand women’s access to educational opportunities.
The final version of the law was enacted as part of an education funding law in 1972—the same year that Congress endorsed the Equal Rights
Amendment, which would later die a protracted death in the state ratification process.4
The core provision of Title IX is a broad and general ban
on sex discrimination. The heart of the law says simply: “No person in the
United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be
denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education
program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. . . .”5
As with other
similarly broad statutes, “discrimination” is a loaded and highly malleable
term. It requires interpretation, and the consensus that the term generates
masks what are often sharp conflicts about its meaning.
Today, almost everyone agrees that discrimination is wrong, but questions
about what that means, the implications of remedying it, and who will bear
the costs have historically been the subject of deep social conflict. Title IX is
no exception. The rosy glow of consensus quickly gave way to bitter disputes
over the law’s application to sports. Although Senator Bayh’s oblique remarks
about football were intended to reassure skeptics that the law would not be
too far-reaching, they implicitly reflected an expectation that the law would
apply to athletics. The sports establishment soon rallied to try to cabin the
law’s implications for intercollegiate sports. The National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA) was a leader in this effort. With the group’s support,
Senator John Tower of Texas attempted to amend Title IX in the early 1970s. Senator Tower first introduced a bill that would have exempted intercollegiate sports entirely. When that effort ran into opposition, he sponsored an
alternative proposal to exempt “intercollegiate athletic activity to the extent
that such activity does or may provide gross receipts or donations to the
institution necessary to support that activity.”6
The Tower Amendment passed in the Senate, but when the Education
Amendments of 1974 reached the joint House-Senate conference, the conference committee replaced it with a compromise provision that basically
evaded the tough questions about how Title IX would apply to sports. Proposed by Senator Jacob Javits of New York and henceforth known as the Javits
Amendment, the compromise delegated authority to the federal enforcing
agency, then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), to
issue regulations for implementing Title IX that included “with respect to
intercollegiate athletics reasonable provisions considering the nature of particular sports.”7
The Javits Amendment recognized that Title IX should allow
for differences among individual sports, with football and its mega-budgets
and squad sizes being the elephant in the room, but it implicitly rejected the
notion that a sport’s ability to raise revenue should categorically exempt it
from Title IX. Still, the compromise left the details—large and small—to be
worked out at another level of government. During the second half of the
1970s, the battle over Title IX shifted from Congress to federal regulators and
eventually to the courts.
Even before the Javits Amendment turned over the job to HEW, the agency’s Office for Civil Rights had already begun struggling with the difficult
question of how to craft antidiscrimination standards to fit intercollegiate
athletics. Lawyers at HEW quickly realized that the desegregation model
for enforcing Title VI, which covers race discrimination in federally funded
schools, could not simply be replicated in Title IX.8
They recognized that
competitive sport was a particularly thorny area for developing measures of
gender equality.
In the vast majority of settings in which antidiscrimination laws apply,
including employment and voting rights, assimilation and gender neutrality
are the guiding norms and goals shared by the law’s supporters.9
For example,
although American workplaces continue to have a significant degree of de
facto sex gender segregation, both vertically and horizontally, employment
discrimination laws aspire to dismantle this segregation and create a genderblind opportunity structure.10 In the world of sports, however, it is much less
clear that integration is or should be the primary goal of Title IX. As was true
in 1972, sex segregation remains the norm for sports competition today, and there is no consensus, even among Title IX’s strongest proponents, that the
law should aspire otherwise.
When HEW was developing its proposal for Title IX regulations, some
stakeholders argued for sex integration as the measure of equality. Among
them, some women’s rights advocates acknowledged that temporarily separate sports programs for women might be necessary as a type of affirmative
action but pushed for the ultimate goal of having men and women compete
for a spot on the same team. Other stakeholders who supported sex integration, however, did so as a way of preserving the status quo. For example,
during early debates over the Title IX regulations, some male athletic directors argued that colleges should be able to satisfy Title IX simply by opening
tryouts to men and women, even if the end result was all-male teams with
no additional female participation.11 Supporters of separate women’s sports
programs vigorously resisted such proposals, arguing for a more substantive
measure of nondiscrimination that would ensure meaningful opportunities
to participate. The debate drove a wedge between women’s rights advocates
over how best to achieve sex equality in sports.
The feminist group most critical of sex segregation in sports, the National
Organization for Women (NOW), argued that “separate but equal” was an
inappropriate permanent baseline for sports, as for other areas of public
life. But NOW acknowledged that sex-separate teams might be a necessary
interim measure until the gap in training and experience closed and women
could meaningfully compete with men.
Other advocates of women’s sports were more comfortable with sex separation as a lasting baseline and pushed for measures of equality within sexseparate programs. The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women
(AIAW), for example, argued for separate teams for all men’s and women’s
sports, with proportionate funding.12 The organization made the case that
giving women control over their own resources would allow them to develop
their own model of sports rather than simply replicate what men had designed
for themselves. Separation would allow women broader opportunities in sport
instead of limiting them to the sports selected for men. More important, the
group hoped that women’s programs might avoid the commercialism that was
already taking hold in men’s programs, and emphasized broad participation,
instead of spending vast sums on a few elite athletes.13 The AIAW represented
female physical educators, the vast majority of whom would have been pleased
with separate teams, as long as they had sufficient resources to succeed.
Sifting through the arguments in 1973, HEW’s Office for Civil Rights initially considered two very different approaches: (1) opening up team tryouts to all athletes, male and female; or (2) keeping sex-separate programs but
developing measures of equality to ensure equal opportunities.14 By 1974,
when it issued draft regulations, HEW had rejected the first option. Instead,
the draft regulations issued for public “notice and comment” required educational institutions to annually gauge the athletic interests of their student
bodies and to engage in affirmative action to increase women’s opportunities
in sports.15 The “affirmative efforts” requirement included providing women
with training and support and encouraging them to take advantage of existing athletic opportunities.
The agency received nearly ten thousand sets of written comments on the
draft regulations, prompting Secretary Casper Weinberger to observe, with
a tinge of sarcasm, that “the most important issue in the United States today
is intercollegiate athletics.”16 Various interest groups opposed the draft regulations, including the NCAA, which feared the regulations would have the
effect of taking resources away from men’s sports.
After sorting through the comments, HEW made substantial revisions
before issuing final regulations in 1975. The Javits Amendment had given
Congress a window of opportunity to block the regulations if it disapproved
of them. Backed by the NCAA and the big-time football schools, members
of Congress introduced several resolutions to stop the regulations from taking effect. Supporters fought back in congressional hearings on the regulations, putting forward extensive evidence on the extent and magnitude of sex
discrimination in intercollegiate athletics. Among the many examples, Ohio
State University was noted for spending 1,300 times more money on male
than on female athletes.17 The effort to disapprove the regulations ultimately
failed, and they went into effect in the summer of 1975.18 They allowed for a
three-year grace period for athletic programs, requiring full compliance by
1978. The deadline passed with very little effort toward compliance, but there
was much continuing dialogue about exactly what the regulations required.
Title IX’s Baseline: Separation, Not Integration
The final Title IX regulations reflect the determination that gender neutrality in team tryouts is insufficient to provide real equality for women in
sport. And yet, the structure of the regulation on equal athletic opportunity
is itself interesting, and reflects some ambivalence about sex segregation in
sports even as it rejects assimilation as the full measure of equality. The key
regulation begins with a strong statement endorsing gender integration in
sports. The first section states: (a) General. No persons shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, be treated differently from another
person or otherwise be discriminated against in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, club or intramural athletics offered by a recipient, and no recipient shall provide any such athletics separately on such basis.
19
After this strong statement endorsing sex integration in sports programs,
the next part of the regulation reads like a jarring reversal:
(b) Separate Teams. Notwithstanding the requirements of paragraph (a) of
this section, a recipient may operate or sponsor separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive
skill or the activity involved is a contact sport.20
Although the structure of the regulation suggests that integration is the
general rule, with sex separation being the exception, in reality the reverse is
true. At least at the varsity level, team selection is always based on competitive skill, which means that sex-separate teams are allowed in both contact
and noncontact sports. If sex separation is the exception, then it is the exception that swallows the rule.
By using the term “may” rather than “shall,” the Title IX regulation itself
does not require separate athletic offerings for men and women. However,
by permitting sex-separate programs under most circumstances, the Title IX
regulations left intact the reality of sex-segregated sports. Moreover, it is not
at all clear that a gender-blind team selection process would satisfy the regulation’s commitment to equal athletic opportunity. A separate requirement in
a later provision of the regulation, discussed in depth in chapter 3, requires
equal athletic opportunity in the selection of sports and levels of competition
so as to effectively accommodate the interests and abilities of members of
both sexes.21 In its comments on this part of the regulations, HEW explained
that this provision may effectively require schools to provide separate teams
for male and female athletes. In order to accommodate the interests and
abilities of women, the agency advised, “an institution would be required to
provide separate teams for men and women in situations where the provision of only one team would not ‘accommodate the interests and abilities of
both sexes.’”22
Whether merely permitted or actually required by Title IX, sex-separate
teams for women have remained the norm in the post–Title IX era. This
reality fundamentally shapes the rest of Title IX’s approach to equal athletic opportunity. Within the baseline of separation, there is some allowance in
the Title IX regulations for integration rights, a topic taken up in the next
chapter, but coed sports are the exception and not the rule. This has generated a longstanding debate about whether sex-separate teams can ever be
truly equal and whether separation is the best baseline under Title IX.
A (Locker) Room of One’s Own: The Case for Separation
The case for having a baseline of separate sports for men and women
dates back to the pre–Title IX years, when women athletic administrators
were in the early stages of developing women’s sports. In 1963, female athletic
administrators attending the NCAA annual convention asked the NCAA not
to allow women to compete on men’s teams.23 They had several rationales,
including a fear that women would be hurt in competition with men, a concern about a potential talent drain from women’s sports, and a desire to prevent women’s programs from developing along the same lines as men’s sports,
with their scandals and commercialism. In addition, the push for maintaining separate women’s programs was based on a desire to maintain control
over women’s sports by female educators, who placed a different, more educational value on sports than the administrators who ran men’s sports.
Early judicial rationales for sex separation in sports emphasized physical
differences and the potential for women to be injured in coed competition.
However, as such rationales came to be viewed as chauvinistic and inconsistent with emerging legal norms on gender discrimination, the dominant
rationale shifted to an emphasis on protecting women’s increasing athletic
opportunities from male encroachment.
An important test case arose in 1980. It involved a talented eleven-year-old
girl, Karen O’Connor, who wanted to try out for the sixth-grade boys’ basketball team. Karen had played basketball with boys in youth sports leagues
since she was seven years old. Although the junior high school she attended
offered both girls’ and boys’ basketball teams, Karen believed that only the
boys’ team could offer her the level of competition that would enable her to
develop her skills. When school officials insisted that she try out for the girls’
team or not compete at all, as required by the school’s athletic conference,
Karen’s parents sued on her behalf, bringing claims under both Title IX and
the equal protection clause.24
Karen’s ability to compete with boys on the basketball court was not the
issue. As the court of appeals acknowledged, “a professional basketball coach
who observed her play rated her ability as equal to or better than a female high school sophomore and equal to that of a male eighth-grade player.”25 Nevertheless, the appellate court reversed the lower court’s ruling that she had a right
to try out for the boys’ team. Emphasizing that the teams were equal except for
the level of play by the athletes themselves, the court ruled that the school district’s decision to maintain separate girls and boys teams was justified by the
important objective of increasing girls’ overall participation in sports.26
U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who sided with the school
district in an earlier proceeding in the case, made a similar point:27
In my opinion, the question whether the discrimination is justified cannot
depend entirely on whether the girls’ program will offer Karen the opportunities that are equal in all respects to the advantages she would gain from
the higher level of competition in the boys’ program. The answer must
depend on whether it is permissible for the defendants to structure their
athletic programs by using sex as one criterion for eligibility. If the classification is reasonable in substantially all of its applications, I do not believe
that the general rule can be said to be unconstitutional simply because it
appears arbitrary in an individual case.28
Justice Stevens’s remarks reflect the tension between a model of equality that prioritizes the goal of advancing the position of a social group and
one geared toward ensuring that individuals are not penalized by their social
group membership. His position, and that of the appellate court, prioritizes
the rights of the social group, women, to maximize their overall athletic
opportunities. Under this reasoning, if team selection were made on a gender-blind, individualized basis, male athletes would likely dominate sports
teams, leaving fewer opportunities for women. Even if men could somehow be kept off of women’s teams, there would still be a significant cost to
women’s sports. The talent drain from having the best female athletes play
on “men’s” teams could slow the development of women’s sports, depriving other women of the chance to compete against the best women in the
game. Interest in women’s sports might develop more slowly as a result, with
women’s teams being further stigmatized for including only those women
not good enough to get onto the “men’s” team.
The more recent controversy over the teen golf phenomenon Michelle
Wie and her effort to play in the men’s league shows that the same set of concerns still arises when elite women athletes seek to leave the women’s game
to compete with men. When Wie took the game by storm as a fifteen-yearold, generating the kind of public attention and media spotlight rarely seen in women’s golf, many supporters of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) feared that her determination to play in the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) would hurt the women’s league. As one sports writer
described the predicament, “No wonder the LPGA is nervous about Wie. It
cannot afford to lose golf ’s starlet to a man’s world.”29 Wie’s foray into the
men’s game generated a great deal of press attention, but her fame quickly
faded when she did not excel in that venue. Some perceived it as a slight
to the LPGA, in which Wie had yet to distinguish herself as a champion
comparable to the likes of Annika Sorenstam. One commentator lamented,
“Michelle Wie would generate more attention for playing poorly at men’s
events than Sorenstam did for winning against women. Which, of course,
is a shame.”30 By choosing to compete against men, elite female athletes may
send the message that competition with men is more worthy of public attention and accolades than women’s sports.
The O’Connor case typifies the rationales courts use to justify sex segregation in sports. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals used similar reasoning in
another watershed case that addressed the constitutionality of sex separation
in sports, this time overturning a lower-court ruling that Title IX’s allowance
for separate teams in contact sports violated the equal protection clause of
the U.S. Constitution. The Sixth Circuit ruled that a school district has the
discretion to offer coed opportunities where doing so furthers equal opportunity for girls, as for example where there is no comparable girls’ team in
the sport. However, the court rejected the argument that Title IX’s allowance
of sex-separate opportunities violates the equal protection clause. The court
took a more substantive approach to equality, explaining, “[w]hen males and
females are not in fact similarly situated and when the law is blind to those
differences, there may be as much a denial of equality as when a difference is
created which does not exist.”31 The court continued, expressing its concern
for promoting real opportunities for girls:
When considering the constitutionality of Title IX and its regulations, a
blanket requirement of one team at each age level might result in male dominance of all teams and cause a return to pre-Title IX conditions, a result
completely at variance with the statute’s purpose. It is desirable to maximize
the opportunities for individual women, but a requirement that boys play
only on boys’ teams while girls may compete either with the boys or in an
all-girls’ program (as they wish) might have a similar undesirable effect on
the fledgling women’s athletic programs; women’s athletics may be significantly harmed if the best female competition is lost to the boys’ program.32 Like Justice Stevens in his opinion in the O’Connor case, this court viewed
Title IX as protecting the rights of women as a group over the occasionally
conflicting interests of exceptional female athletes.33
There is, of course, a significant cost to this model of equality that emphasizes what is best for women as a group. Exceptionally gifted athletes like
Karen O’Connor who are able to compete with male athletes may be worse
off because they are denied the chance to play at the highest level. Karen
O’Connor felt so strongly about her preference for competing with boys that,
after losing in court, she chose not to try out for the girls’ team and to forgo
playing basketball at the school.34 Limiting exceptional female athletes to
competition on women’s teams may keep the very best female athletes from
developing to their full potential, depriving the public of seeing just how
good top female athletes can become.
Faced with this tension, Title IX sides with a group-based vision of equality, emphasizing the goal of developing strong women’s sports programs that
expand women’s overall opportunities. As Justice Stevens explained, “without
a gender-based classification . . . there would be a substantial risk that boys
would dominate the girls’ program and deny them an equal opportunity to
compete in interscholastic events.”35 Such an approach would leave many
girls and women shut out of varsity sports entirely, relegated to second-tier
sports competition.
In such a world, there would be too few female athletes competing to shift
cultural gender norms. The few women competing at high levels would be
perceived as tokens and as exceptional female athletes who are recognized
because of their differences from other women, thereby ultimately reinforcing the norm of female athletic inferiority rather than contesting it. As
Michael Messner, a scholar of sport and sociology, has warned, mixed-sex
competition under the guise of “equal opportunity” and liberal feminism “is
likely to become a new means of solidifying the ideological hegemony of male
superiority” by “provid[ing] support for the ideology of meritocracy while at
the same time offering incontrovertible evidence of the ‘natural’ differences
between males and females.”36 In other words, a shift from sex separation
to a gender-blind selection process would send the message that men have
“earned” their privileged status in sports, while reinforcing the notion that
few women belong in sport, and only if they can compete on men’s terms.
Indeed, in the battle over the meaning of equal opportunity in sports, the
gender-blind approach has often been a strategy for thwarting more substantive measures of equality. When a class of female athletes sued Temple
University in the 1980s for not allocating enough funding, resources, or opportunities for women to play varsity sports, Temple responded that its
varsity men’s teams just happened to be filled by men. In actuality, Temple
claimed, the teams are open to any athlete good enough to make them, male
or female. As a result, Temple argued, the funding, resources, and opportunities provided to athletes on teams filled by men should count as programs that support female athletes, as well. This argument did not prevail,
and the female athletes who brought the case eventually won an important
settlement requiring Temple to put more resources into its women’s sports
program. More recently, Florida’s state high school athletic association used
a similar argument in attempting to defend a 20 percent schedule reduction
for varsity sports that exempted football. Classifying football as a coed sport
since girls as well as boys could try out, the association argued that the schedule cuts were gender-neutral. It later backed down from this argument when
parents of female athletes filed a Title IX lawsuit, alleging that the exemption
of football left girls bearing the brunt of the cuts. The case was settled when
the association agreed to rescind the schedule changes.37
In addition to protecting large numbers of competitive sports opportunities for women, the case for sex separation also considers how best to structure sport to make it an empowering experience for girls and women. Many
girls and women prefer having their own teams, where they are less likely to
feel threatened, inadequate, or unwelcome.38 Research on coed sports suggests that male athletes tend to take over, keeping women from playing or
fully developing their skills and confidence.39 The sports anthropologist Faye
Linda Wachs explains that “when girls attempt to join boys in sports, they
often find themselves ignored, placed in devalued positions (positions to
which the ball is rarely hit), and they do not receive the same instruction and
encouragement as the boys.”40 Her study of adult coed softball found that
male athletes used a number of strategies for limiting women’s participation,
including “positional segregation,” that is, the “gendering” of field positions
and the placement of players into positions by gender. Through this tactic,
women were more likely to be placed in “helper” positions where they would
pass the ball to others, rather than make the play themselves. Another strategy identified in the study was “the switch,” in which male players temporarily switched positions with female players in order to make a play. For example, a male outfielder would run into a female player’s territory and shout, “I
got it,” even if the female player was well positioned to catch the ball. Wachs
explains how these kinds of practices become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anticipating the “switch,” a female athlete will play more tentatively, unsure
of whether to step in and make the play or leave it to a male colleague.