What is being said inn the text? If she  guesses wrong and misses the play, this is used to validate the “switch” in the
first place. A similar confidence-draining strategy Wachs observed involved
instructions that directed women to hold back, anticipating incompetence,
in high-stakes moments. For example, female batters were encouraged to
take “walks” at important points in the game when a male batter was up next.
Even when well intentioned, such practices hinder the empowering and confidence-building potential of sport for women.
Other research has also questioned whether coed sports are a site of
empowerment and skills building for girls and women, even prior to the
onset of physical differences that might make boys better athletes on average.41 In their study of kindergarteners playing coed T-ball, Melissa Landers
and Gary Fine found that, instead of challenging gender role socialization
and nurturing girls’ athletic skills, coed T-ball reinforced gender hierarchies
and discouraged girls from later participation in sports.42 Both male and
female coaches were more likely to demean and criticize the girls’ abilities,
and they provided boys with greater instruction and encouragement. The
study concluded that, rather than correcting gender inequities in coed participation, coaches and teachers often reinforced it. As a result, girls were less
likely to find the game fun and were more likely to lose interest in sports.43
The case for separation also emphasizes the value of all-female spaces for
creating bonds between girls and women and developing a stronger sense of
identity. This is particularly valuable for young adolescents who are struggling to sort through conflicting and multilayered messages about femininity
and female bodies. Instead of worrying about how boys perceive them, girls
can focus on their bodies as a source of strength and functionality. All-female
sports can also teach healthy interfemale competition and cooperation. Competing with and against other women in sports challenges the dominant cultural lens that tries to turn competition among women into “catfights” and
has trouble understanding female competition as anything other than fighting over a boyfriend or superficial jealousy over who is more attractive or
popular. By providing a setting where women play together, work together,
and compete together, all-female sports can teach healthy models of competition and cooperation. Such experiences can help dispel pervasive gender stereotypes that encourage distrust of women leaders and portray female
bosses as mean, petty, and difficult to work for.
In terms of influencing the legal framework, the case for sex separation in
sports has had much greater impact than the arguments against it. Nevertheless, there are significant downsides to the “separate but equal” model, and
arguments for gender integration are not easily dismissed. The Critique of Separation:
Reinforcing Sex Difference and Gender Hierarchy
As a strategy for promoting gender equality in sports, Title IX’s baseline of
sex separation is not without costs. Separating women from men in athletic
competition sends the message that men are better athletes. After all, the judicial rationale for preserving sex separation in sports, evident in the O’Connor
case, assumes that gender-blind selection would leave female athletes with
fewer opportunities because they cannot hold their own against male athletes. This message is troubling and has led some supporters of gender equality to question whether sex separation should be abandoned in favor of an
integrationist model. Karen Tokarz, a law professor, for example, has argued
that sex segregation in sports “fosters the myth of male supremacy” and “perpetuates the sex role stereotype of women as passive and weak.”44 Another
legal scholar, B. Glenn George, is also critical of sex-separate teams, arguing
that separate is not equal in this context and pointing to the greater expenditures, resources, and attention devoted to men’s intercollegiate sports.45
Mary Jo Kane, a sports sociologist, has raised the related concern that
separating male and female athletes makes gender a more salient and prominent category that shapes our thinking about sports. With teams divided by
gender, male and female athletes are channeled into “gender-appropriate”
sports, and athletes who conform to the gender continuum receive the most
positive cultural attention. Female athletes in figure skating and gymnastics,
for example, garner more spectator interest than the women who play rugby.
Likewise, football players typically garner more status and attention than
male swimmers and volleyball players. The gender division of sports thus
“works to suppress evidence of a [gender] continuum,” making sex difference seem more natural, inevitable, and significant than it is.46 Speaking of
sex segregation in education more generally, the feminist legal scholar Nancy
Levit makes a similar point when she observes that the impact of single-sex
environments on the cultural construction of gender is too often ignored in
debates over sex segregation in education, and warns that separation may
exalt and exaggerate perceived gender differences.47
Proponents of gender integration in sports emphasize the importance of
challenging the gender ideology that views the presence of women in male
sports as threatening to the gender order. Much of the resistance to gender
integration in sports reflects deep-seated attachment to what sport sociologists describe as the masculinizing function of sports. When girls and women
seek to join male teams, they undermine the ability of sports to teach a traditional masculinity that defines manhood by its distance from, and superiority over, femininity. The determination not to “throw like a girl” loses its
force when confronted by a girl who throws well.
Some early court decisions rebuffing claims by female athletes who
sought to try out for male sports teams reflect this troubling gender ideology. For example, a pre–Title IX Connecticut decision rejected a high
school girl’s attempt to try out for boys’ track and cross country.48 The judge
reasoned that, although “[a]thletic competition builds character in boys,”
“[w]e do not need that kind of character in our girls.”49 He continued, tellingly, to proclaim that the male population is “not so decadent” as to get a
thrill out of beating girls.50 The judge’s apprehensiveness about boys engaging in sports with girls reflects anxiety about a loss in status and about the
ability of sports to confer that status if male athletes have to compete with
girls. Beating a girl would dilute the masculinity that comes from successful athletic competition. And, of greater significance, the judge’s reaction
reflects an anxiety over the unspoken question of what happens to a boy’s
masculinity if he loses to a girl.51
Some of the fiercest battles to keep girls out of male sports have been
fought over baseball. As the historian Sarah Fields points out, it is no accident that most of the lawsuits brought by girls seeking to compete on boys’
teams have involved baseball, a sport highly infused with national identity
and masculinity.52 Organized baseball has a long and unfortunate history of
fighting to keep girls and women from playing the sport.53 In one early example, the University of Pennsylvania acted quickly to bar women from playing
baseball when five women spontaneously joined men in an on-campus baseball game in 1904.54 Women were also excluded from professional baseball.
When a seventeen-year-old young woman, Jackie Mitchell, signed a minor
league contract in 1931, she struck out baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou
Gehrig in an exhibition game. The commissioner quickly responded by voiding Mitchell’s contract and issuing new rules that barred women from the
sport on the grounds that it was too strenuous for women.55
The sport was no more welcoming to younger female players. Little League
began in 1939 as a summer program to teach boys masculinity and Americanism. The federal charter giving Little Legal nonprofit status, signed by
President Lyndon Johnson, specifically stated its purpose as assisting “boys
in developing qualities of citizenship, sportsmanship, and manhood.”56 By
the 1970s, girls and their parents were questioning girls’ exclusion from Little
League, and some families brought lawsuits to challenge it.The first such case, decided in 1973, was not successful. Ten-year-old
Pamela Magill brought an equal protection challenge to the decision of the
Avonworth Baseball Conference, in western Pennsylvania, not to permit her
to play Little League baseball.57 The directors of the league countered that if
girls were allowed to play, it would “destroy” the league because boys would
not want to play against girls and would drop out of the sport. The court sided
with the defendant on the ground that the conference was not a state actor
and therefore was not subject to the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Adding insult to injury, the court went on to opine unfavorably on the merits
of Magill’s claim, reasoning that sex differences and the nature of baseball as
a contact sport made it “rational” to exclude girls from the game.58
As sex-discrimination law began to take shape in the early to mid-1970s,
however, the tide was beginning to turn.59 In 1974, one year after the Magill
case, a New Jersey appellate court interpreted New Jersey’s law barring discrimination in places of public accommodation to require Little League
chapters in the state to allow girls on the team. The court was not persuaded
by Little League’s arguments for excluding eight- to twelve-year-old girls,
which were based on protectionist rationales about girls as weaker athletes,
and ordered the league to admit girls.60 Little League Baseball considered
appealing to the New Jersey Supreme Court, and many teams in the state
decided to suspend play rather than to allow girls; however, the controversy
was soon settled at a higher level of government.61
The cases caught the attention of Congress, and Congress acted to amend
the Little League charter in 1974 to broaden the beneficiaries of the sport to
“young people,” in place of the previously stated purpose of assisting boys
in developing manhood. As a result, Little League changed its rules in 1974
to allow girls to participate in Little League baseball, while at the same time
creating Little League Softball for girls—a move clearly designed to channel
girls into a more feminized version of the sport. As of 2003, 360,000 girls
participated in Little League Softball, and 100,000 girls participated in Little
League Baseball.62 In schools today, baseball is still a sport typically played
by boys, with girls playing softball. By too readily accepting sex separation in
sports, critics argue, Title IX misses an opportunity to challenge the gender
ideology behind the exclusion of women from men’s games.
Critics of sex separation in sport also warn of its tendency to produce different rules for male and female sports. The contrast between baseball and
softball is just one example of how sex separation leads to different sport rules
based on the sex of the participants. Sports for girls and women have often been modified to make them less physically demanding, such as the allowance for “checking” in lacrosse and ice hockey when played by boys but not
by girls. Basketball, too, for most of its history has been played by girls under
very different rules. For many years, girls’ teams had six players instead of
five, and teams played on a divided court to make the game less strenuous.63
Legal challenges to rule differences in girls’ sports have been mostly unsuccessful. For example, Victoria Ann Cape, a high school basketball player, was
rebuffed in her Title IX and constitutional challenges to Tennessee Secondary
School Athletic Association rules limiting women to half-court basketball,
mandating six players on the court, and restricting players in certain positions from shooting the ball.64 The court of appeals reasoned that the same
gender differences in athleticism that support separating competition by sex
in the first place also justify the development of different rules of the game
for men and women. Such reasoning, however, does not inevitably follow
from the justification for sex-separate teams. One federal district court in
Arkansas ruled that the state athletic association’s rules limiting girls to halfcourt basketball violated the equal protection clause, even though the court
assumed that it was constitutional to have separate teams for boys and girls.65
This court recognized the disadvantage the half-court rules caused Arkansas
girls in competing for college scholarships and the lack of a sufficient justification for preventing girls from fully experiencing the game. Most courts,
however, have used the gender-difference rationale behind sex separation to
justify different rules for conducting male and female sports.66
Athletic associations gradually brought the rules of girls’ basketball in line
with the boys’ game voluntarily. Girls’ basketball has not been played sixon-six in a state-sanctioned game since Oklahoma abolished the practice in
1995.67 Nevertheless, many male and female sports continue to have different
rules. Some rule differences correspond to average physical differences, such
as the practice of having a lower net for women’s volleyball than for men’s
volleyball. Others, however, change the game more fundamentally, such as
the checking/no-checking difference in men’s and women’s ice hockey.68
In theory, rules for girls’ and women’s sports might develop differently
in order to better design sports to fit their interests, skills, and bodies. As
a male-dominated institution, sport has been tailored to men’s bodies and
interests and has been designed to showcase men’s talents and abilities. However, a less charitable explanation may be traced back to the ideology of preserving the construction of masculinity through male sports participation.
In this ideology, it diminishes the boys’ game if girls play the game in the
same manner as the boys.69Another piece of the gender ideology behind keeping women off men’s
teams is the fear that women’s participation will introduce an element of sexuality into sport and the desire to preserve a carefully guarded heterosexual
image in men’s sports. This concern is often behind the resistance to coed
wrestling. It is often expressed in terms of boys being hamstrung in their
moves in an effort to avoid what might be construed as sexual contact. Opponents raise the specter that coed wrestling introduces an element of sexuality that they do not believe is present when males wrestle other males. This
concern reflects an anxiety about sexuality in sports that involve close bodily
contact between men. Implicit and pervasive heterocentric norms hide the
intimacy of the moves when it’s “just the guys” competing, but the involvement of women in the sport heightens awareness of the intimacy of the
moves involved in the sport. As Sarah Fields explains the negative reaction
to girls seeking to integrate wrestling teams, “People who had never given
much critical thought to scantily clad young men rolling around together
on a mat suddenly had a means of deflecting concerns of male sexuality and
homoeroticism.”70 This kind of “sex panic” often occurs when women seek
to integrate male-dominant settings where physicality is prominent. Women’s integration into the military, for example, has often been resisted on the
grounds that the presence of women in close physical quarters introduces a
problematic sexuality that is otherwise presumed to be absent. The concern
about sexuality often sits alongside an even deeper anxiety about men losing to women in tests of physical power. These combined concerns have led
some boys (supported by their parents) to forfeit wrestling matches against
girls in coed competitions, leaving the girls with fewer competitive opportunities and the message that they are not proper competitors.71
Proponents of gender integration in sport emphasize the importance of
resisting these gender ideologies that underlie prohibitions on female-male
competition in sport. They see a missed opportunity for the potentially
transformative power of gender-integrated teams to challenge existing gender relations and redefine them on a more equal basis.
The case for coed sports competition and against Title IX’s baseline of
sex segregation gained prominence recently in a book by Eileen McDonagh
and Laura Pappano called Playing with the Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal
in Sports.
72 McDonagh and Pappano make the case against sex segregation
in sports with great depth and eloquence. They argue that the gender division in sports rests on gender stereotypes and not actual physical differences
and that it reinforces the view that women’s sports are a diluted version of
“real” (male) sports. Their argument has its roots in liberal feminism, which regards persons as individuals to be judged on their own merits, not defined
or limited by gender. They advocate a world of competitive sports in which
athletes are selected for their abilities without regard to gender. They lambast Title IX’s acceptance of sex segregation as the norm for sports, thereby
“codify[ing] historic myths about female physical inferiority and foster[ing]
a system which, while offering women more opportunities than ever before,
still keeps them from being perceived as equal athletes to men.”73
Under their proposal, separate women’s teams could still exist on a voluntary basis to compensate for discrimination, but coercive sex segregation in sports would be replaced with a gender-blind, best-athlete model.
Their position allowing voluntary separate teams for women who choose
not to compete with men would likely mean that the “open to all” teams
would have top-tier status, with the most resources, publicity, and school
support. In other words, implicit in what these authors propose is that firstorder sports, those played at the highest varsity level, would be open to all
athletes, male and female, for tryouts, while separate women’s teams could
continue on a voluntary basis, with a status more akin to club or intramural
sports.
In advocating the integration model, McDonagh and Pappano persuasively argue that sex segregation constructs and amplifies, rather than merely
reflects, sex differences between male and female athletes. They point out
that there is much more variance in physical ability within the sexes than
there is between them and that average sex differences do not translate into
female inferiority. Some physical differences give female athletes an advantage on average. For example, women’s higher percentage of body fat helps
them in endurance events. They cite, as an example, study results in which
equally trained male and female athletes performed identically in races over
forty-two kilometers and women outperformed men at distances over ninety
kilometers.74 To be sure, other average physical differences give an advantage
to men on balance, but many individual women still perform equal to or better than many individual men. Moreover, average sex differences in athletic
performance are declining.75 As more women have the training, opportunity,
and encouragement to perform at their full capacity, average performance
gaps may shrink further or even, over time, disappear altogether.76
McDonagh and Pappano argue that female athletes will never be equal to
men as long as sex-separate participation is the norm. Their book has reinvigorated the debate over separation versus integration in sports and raises
troubling questions about Title IX’s baseline of sex separation as a starting
point for measuring equal opportunityWhich Side Is Right?
It is the nature of a dilemma that there is no singular resolution that avoids
the pitfalls of the path not taken without a significant downside of its own.
The choice between gender assimilation and gender integration in sports
presents precisely such a dilemma. The case against sex-segregated sports is
overwhelmingly persuasive—until you consider the case against sex integration as the baseline. And vice versa. Exploring this dilemma raises interesting
questions without clear answers. What is the significance of the message sent
by gender separation? Is it that women are weaker and men are the “real”
athletes? Or is it that women’s value as athletes does not depend on their
ability to compete with men, that girls and women deserve support as athletes in their own right, and that all-female competition in sport is powerful,
robust, and fun? More important, whatever the message sent by sex-separate
competition, how does it compare to the reality of how the choice between
assimilation and separation affects real opportunities for girls and women
in sports? How should Title IX weigh the importance of ideology—which is
complex and difficult to discern—against concrete opportunities?
Although there are no easy answers to these questions, I do not believe
that gender integration as the baseline would do a better job of subverting
women’s second-class status in sports than the current default of separation.
At the level of ideology, it is not at all clear that integration challenges rather
than reinforces messages of women’s inferiority in sports. Both sides in the
argument over separation and integration rely on and reinforce assumptions
of male athletic superiority. For example, in the O’Connor case discussed earlier, the argument for separating boys and girls was that boys would dominate otherwise, leaving fewer opportunities for women to play sports. But
the opposing argument also drew upon and reinforced an ideology of male
athletic superiority. Karen O’Connor’s reason for wanting to play on the
boys’ team was that boys play the game better and she needed the challenge
to fully develop her skills.
Rather than subverting traditional gender ideologies, a shift to genderneutral team selection buys into the notion that, to be “real” athletes, women
must compete with men and that any athletic field that does not include men
is not worthy of support. It takes as a given the reality that the sports offered
in our schools have been selected for and governed by men to ensure their fit
with men’s bodies, interests, and abilities. Instead of weakening gender hierarchy in sports and transforming gender relations, switching to a baseline of
coed play would more likely wind up reinforcing an ideology of male athleticsuperiority, with the message that it is only the exceptional and unusual (not
“real”) woman who can compete with the boys. Both sex separation and integration risk reinforcing the ideology of male dominance.
More important, the debate over the cultural meaning of sex separation
versus integration cannot be resolved in the abstract without attention to the
effects on real opportunities for girls and women in sports. If gender-blind
team selection would significantly reduce the numbers of girls and women
playing varsity sports, either because they no longer wanted to play sports or
because of average sex differences, the effect of gender integration, in terms
of both gender ideology and real opportunities, would be much worse than
that of sex separation. If female athleticism is viewed as exceptional and aberrational and male ascendancy as the natural result of merit-based selection,
girls’ and women’s sports will lose their power to promote cultural change.
As Paul Willis, a scholar of sport and society, explains, “Heroic sports success
amongst a few women—without a massive, corresponding ideological battle
to change the field of force of meaning—will not lead to greater participation
regularly in schools and sports centres by girls and women, nor to a liberation in their sense of gender.”77
Two feminist authors and sport scholars, Leslie Heywood and Shari Dworkin, touch upon a similar theme when they discuss the cultural significance
of the movie Girlfight, in which a female boxer struggles for recognition and
success in the male preserve of boxing.78 She fights men, and at one level the
movie promotes the feminist message that women can compete with men
in the toughest of sports. However, the film highlights her differences from
other women as much as it displays her “masculine” traits of strength and
courage. Picking up on this subtext, Heywood and Dworkin reveal another
layer of meaning that undercuts the film’s exterior feminist message. They
ask, “Does her individual growth, then, help the status of the generic girls to
whom she is contrasted, or does it merely serve to reinforce those conventions because she is presented as different?” Is her ascendance “available to
all girls,” or does it bolster a form of male power while promoting the (false)
ideology that it’s available to all?79 Their questions drive home the point that
if girls’ and women’s success in sports is at or near token levels, the feminist
gain from seeing elite women compete against men will be lost to the deeper
message that female excellence in sport is aberrational.
Given the conflicting ways to “read” the ideology of gender integration
and separation in sports, it is better to go with the strategy that produces
the greatest results in terms of the broad participation of girls and women in
sports. It is through this broad participation that Title IX has had its greatest impact. As the sport sociologist David Whitson explains, in a reference to an
influential feminist philosopher, “If [Iris Marion] Young is correct [about the
empowering potential of women learning to use their bodies actively], the
physical empowerment of more women and the entry into sport of greater
numbers of women will steadily contribute toward breaking down the masculine connotations of sport itself.”80 Title IX’s effect on female sports participation has set exactly such a process into motion. Title IX’s biggest success,
and its most revolutionary impact in terms of producing cultural transformation, is the huge increase in the number of girls who grow up playing
organized sports, with many of them continuing to do so into adulthood.
This, much more than the accomplishments of a few elite athletes, has had
the greatest impact on changing the place of women in society. Although
celebrity athletes also have an important influence on the culture and provide role models for other female athletes, it is the advent of girls and women
participating in sport in mass numbers that has been truly revolutionary.
As female athletic participation has grown, along with societal interest
and excitement in women’s sports, it is no longer so clear that separate is
necessarily second class for women. Gender ideology and the role of gender in shaping social life, including in sports, are constantly in flux. The past
few decades have seen a remarkable upsurge of respect and appreciation
for female athletes, with each new Olympics touting the extraordinary performance of women in the post–Title IX era. There is more appreciation of
women in sports than ever before. Discourses about powerful women and
“girl power” coexist and compete with more reactionary discourses that
marginalize female athletes by highlighting their appearance or sexuality. In
sports, as in other areas of social life, the cultural debate over gender continues, with competing views on what it means and how social policies should
respond.
Critics who would replace Title IX’s structure with gender integration do
not fully grapple with the nature of the dilemma and what would be lost by
retreating from Title IX’s substantive approach to getting women into sports.
In their book criticizing “separate but equal” in sport, McDonagh and Pappano do a terrific job elaborating the costs of sex separation. But they do
not explore the limits of gender integration. They are so steeped in the liberal feminist perspective that they do not acknowledge the pitfalls of such a
strategy or the compelling critique of liberal feminism elsewhere in feminist
theory. At one point, McDonagh and Pappano criticize sex segregation in
sports as “not American” for disregarding the individual and instead placing
emphasis on a person’s membership in a social group.81 A similar philosophy is at the heart of the backlash against affirmative action and the push for
“color blindness” and its counterpart, “gender blindness,” in law and social
policy. But in a system implicitly modeled on male norms and in which gender is a continuing source of inequality, a gender-blind approach often further entrenches inequality rather than eradicates it. In using Brown v. Board
of Education as their liberal model of equality, the authors gloss over the
problems with this paradigm. Once race is eliminated as a device for sorting
students, de facto racial segregation is perfectly lawful. Resulting inequalities
in educational outcomes are then attributed to innate ability and work ethic,
obscuring the structural inequalities like residential segregation and systemic
poverty that leave children of color with much poorer educational opportunities than more privileged white children. The analogy to Brown is far from
perfect, and certainly there was much to gain from stopping a system of stateenforced racial segregation in schools. However, color blindness on its own,
like gender blindness, is a limited theory of equality that fails to grapple with
the deep structures of bias and treats resulting inequalities as the legitimate
result of a fair process. Title IX has been more substantive and creative, taking a more progressive tact than liberal feminism, one that has been made
possible by the law’s baseline allowance for sex separation in sports.
In the final analysis, Title IX has chosen the right priority: expanding
girls’ and women’s participation in sports through a substantive approach
to measuring equality in athletic opportunities. Although the educational
value of sports is often obscured by the commercialization of elite college
sports, particularly in men’s football and basketball programs, sports are in
our schools because of their educational, social, psychological, and physical benefits. These benefits, and the empowerment and fun that come with
them, are every bit as valuable for girls as for boys. Moreover, as a feminist
project, expanding female athletic participation has the potential to empower
women and to broaden their access to power in society. A strategy focused
on empowering a greater number of women through sport has more transformative potential than a strategy of gender-blind sports selection. As the
legal scholar Robert Post has argued, the purpose of sex-discrimination law
should not be to eliminate the social category of gender but to change its
meaning.82
Still, even if the baseline of sex separation is the more promising feminist strategy, the downsides to separation are nevertheless real—hence, the
dilemma cannot be fully and unequivocally resolved. In the final analysis,
whether “separate but equal” works as a feminist strategy in sport depends
on how it is mediated by integration rights and the circumstances under which athletes can cross the gender line. Under Title IX’s legal framework,
sex separation is not absolute. There are important, albeit limited, rights to
cross over to a team offered to the other sex. Chapter 2 examines integration
rights as an important qualification to sex-separate opportunities and evaluates how such integration rights help mitigate, if not eliminate, the downsides
of sex separation. Ideally, the law should work on both fronts: maximizing
the real opportunities for girls and women in sports, while at the same time
critically examining the gender ideology that limits sports opportunities by
a student’s sex.