A Question of Fairness

"I'm not happy with my time," said Uta Pippig, after becoming the female winner of the annual Boston Marathon. Who could blame her. Finishing in 2:25:11, Pipping's time was slower than the one that earned her first place last year. Meanwhile, she beat out ail but thirty-nine men in the field and finished considerably faster than any of the times posted in 1896, the event's inaugural year. Only relatively recently have the Boston Marathon and sporting events like it around the country opened their doors to female participants. Given a chance to compete, women like Pipping have been surprising the sports world ever since, often dispelling stereotypes in the process.

Some have hailed the recent federal court ruling against Brown University as another step in the crusade for equal treatment of women in athletics. They see the scolding of a prestigious university as a long awaited acknowledgment of the second-class status of women's sports at colleges around the country.

What Judge Raymond Pettine's ruling points to is Brown's failure to establish proportionate numbers of varsity athletic positions for men and women as a violation of the federal law known as Title IX. Mandating gender proportionality, supporters say, successfully enfeebles forces that cling to the view that female athletics are less important, getting to the heart of what equal treatment is all about. As Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, asserted, "This win is one more step in the right direction for women's sports."

Title IX reads, "No person...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." There are a pair of obvious and disturbing consequences to reading Title IX as a gender-proportionality standard, neither of which involves the assumption that men's athletics are better, more important, or more fun to watch.

One problem that sticks out right away is that under Pettine's Title IX, the numbers required to field teams in the sports currently offered by many colleges make it impossible for them to avoid violation. Such a standard also factors out the demand of a college's students, ignoring the possibility that different levels of interest might be found within different undergraduate populations.

It seems that the factors contributing to the current relationship between sex and sports may be too complicated to be stuffed inside a simple numerical ratio. Before we jump to endorse a strict standard with important implications for hundreds of universities, it would be useful to consider the complex social dynamic behind athletics in this country.

In our society, at least in theory, there are very few places that we separate men and women--we use different bathrooms, we participate in sports separately and only men register for the draft. Why we do these things is an open question for sociologists and anthropologists. But whatever the reason, these distinctions are made with a faith that there are some essential differences between the sexes that we should take into account.

One of the consequences of separation along gender lines for athletic competition has been the development of different sports to accommodate these alleged differences. Yet history tells us that in long standing athletic traditions like basketball, originally open only to men, women have proven themselves quite capable once given the opportunity to play. Almost all sports that were once the domains of men alone now have female parallels. Universities around the country offer athletic opportunities that reflect this fact. But this is not the case in sports like football and wrestling. For whatever reason, there is little demand from women to establish college-level programs. A similar thing could be said of men's gymnastics, as a declining level of interest among college-aged males has led some schools to cut their programs.

Once we acknowledge there are differing norms of participation for males and females, it becomes sheer fantasy to cite any breach of gender-proportionality as necessarily discrimination. It is absurd to focus on mathematical ratios, disregarding the cultural context in which sports are found.

Is it discriminatory for a college program to strive to conform to the athletic demands of its students? Should a program that fields teams in all sports, if that structure violates proportionality, be viewed as discriminatory? Should programs like Harvard's, that offer nearly all the sports played in America, carry larger rosters on its women's teams to compensate for the inclusion of sports available only to men? Do we need to do away with football and wrestling teams on the grounds that they throw off the balance?

Clearly Title IX was not intended to close down popular sports, and nothing is gained by using it for this purpose. We can acknowledge gender differences in norms of participation without using them to erect barriers of comparison. When the demands for male and female sports are considered equally and athletes have opportunities without regard to their sex, Title IX is being observed. We should continue to see it in this light without falling into the trap of creating equations that amount to quotas. True cases of discrimination continue to be recognizable. Title IX will sift them out if we let it.