Biden to announce change in Title IX women's sports policy

Source: CNN

Washington (CNN) - The Obama administration plans to change the so-called Title IX policy which governs gender equality in sports, eliminating what some women's rights supporters claim is a Bush-administration loophole in compliance, according to a senior White House official.

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The 1972 Title IX education amendment required gender equity in sports programs at educational institutions receiving federal funds.

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In 2005, the administration of former President George W. Bush changed the third requirement, allowing the university to prove it was meeting the athletic interests of women by carrying out surveys of students' interest in sports. The NCAA and women's sports advocates said a low response to such surveys could be interpreted as indicating a lack of interest in sports when actually it could indicate a lack of availability of sports activities.

Under the new policy, universities will no longer be able to claim that a low response to surveys means a low interest in sports, the official said. The new rules still will allow the use of surveys, but universities will have to go further to prove they are complying.

Read more: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/20/biden-to-announce-change-in-title-ix-womens-sports-policy/

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I would have written the headline, "Biden to announce closing Bush Admin's discriminatory loophole in Title IX womens' sports policy"

This should also be good for male cheerleaders as well.





Hat-tip to: http://twitter.com/jeffersondewitt/status/12514627496

SOme programs (like engineering) are majority male. Does this run afoul of Title IX? Vice verse, nursing is majority female. Does this violate?

What kind of scholarly organizations do you mean? Like Phi Beta Kappa?

IS subject to Title IX. It's about the opportunity to belong to those academic societies as well as athletics.

WHat about structural discrimination?

The desire and efforts to bring more women into engineering is a big deal nationally within both the industry and academia. The extra support the relatively few female students got my freshman year was not just noticeable but was openly spoken about by the professors. The retention rate was still abysmally low.

BTW, Title IX is about access. Women have access to the same classes men have access to in engineering. It's not like sports where a woman has not shot at football scholarships.

that created an unfriendly environment for women. One a state school in VA and the other University of Toronto, where the engineering school publishes a really vulgar newspaper, etc. Dealing with that shit every day must suck.

I started in 1996.

Texas A&M and The University of Texas most certainly don't fit that description and neither do any of the schools the men and women I work with went to.

The historical problems were well known but every darn industry publication you read at that time was obsessed with the subject. Our professors went well out of their way to provide mentorship to female students in hopes of keeping them in engineering. I know of numerous engineering programs that changed the entire structure of their first year to accommodate female students (actually anybody but Anglo and Asian males).

Whether it was making sure female professors (who were in positions they otherwise only taught upper level courses) taught first year classes or blatantly clustering female students into certain classes, engineering schools have been taking a very proactive role in fostering female students for over a decade.

I've noticed by school really attempt to step up the male to female ratio went from 80 to 20 to about 60-40 or even 55-45.

when I went. But even within that, finance was just as heavily male as marketing was heavily female.

There's just no way to look at it and claim that the lack of women in some majors and males in other isn't due in large part to the general differences between what each sex is predisposed to be interested in.

But one benefit is that a lot of advanced economics classes that I've had are 50/50 or even majority women, which is a huge upgrade over where the field of study was 20 years ago(hell, maybe even 10 years ago). SO there is progress being made, slowly, but it is being made.

Title IX covers.

The lack of women in the technical fields is a big concern for many of us. One of my daughters went into comp sci. Not a lot of women when she started, barely any when she finished. She never felt any discrimination. At the graduate level, not a lot of women, but few losses. I know a couple of my colleagues are actively researching why women are not entering the technical fields. IIRC its mostly at entrance and attrition rate is fairly close to male students. When I did my first pass in academia Comp Sci had much larger percentage of women than it does today, even when you roll up IT, Comp Sci, and Comp Engineering. All that said, I have never seen structural impediments at the college level and moreover I have seen extra help and retention programs aimed at women technical undergrads. All of my daughters went into some form of technical program and report similar experiences.

Also we have to be careful of the numbers game. Right now the majority of undergraduates are women, depending on the source, in excess of their overall numbers in that age group.

Title IX
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, renamed in 2002 the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in honor of its principal author, but more commonly known simply as Title IX, is a United States law enacted on June 23, 1972. The law states: "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..."<1>

Although the most of Title IX is its impact on high school and collegiate athletics, the original statute made no explicit mention of athletics.<2>

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Applicability and compliance

The legislation covers all educational activities, and complaints under Title IX alleging discrimination in fields such as science or math education, or in other aspects of academic life such as access to health care and dormitory facilities, are not unheard of. It also applies to non-sport activities such as school band and clubs; however, social fraternities and sororities, sex-specific youth clubs such as Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and Girls State and Boys State are specifically exempt from Title IX requirements.

Title IX is administered by the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education (OCR).<8> It applies to an entire school or institution if any part of that school receives federal funds; hence, athletic programs are subject to Title IX, even though there is very little direct federal funding of school sports.<9> The regulations implementing Title IX require all universities receiving federal funds to perform self-evaluations of whether they offer equal opportunities based on sex<10> and to provide written assurances to the Dept. of Education that the institution is in compliance for the period that the federally funded equipment or facilities remain in use.<11>

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX

Shouldn't her attentions been on the funeral, or was there something poignant about that particular funeral?


Yeah, yeah, I get it, it just took me a second. An old Bennet Cerf joke as I recall.

"Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address while traveling there on the back of an envelope".

How many scholarships a year are missed out on by deserving kids who bust their asses learning because the money needs to be used for students who can run fast, kick a ball, or row a boat?

So cancelling one doesn't help the other.

n/m

(Don't let the name fool you)

Opposition to Title IX has long been a major reason for their existence. They are wolves in sheeps clothing, turning feminism on its head in order to protect those poor little boys who are being persecuted by Title IX.

www.iwf.org/campus/show/22864.html

I disagree with the Bush loophole, but the old method of Title IX compliance was terrible, and wound up eliminating men's programs while doing nothing for women.

At the university I was at, we offered every women's sport in the conference, just put up a women's sports complex costing 10's of million's of dollars (way out of proportion to expenditures / student on men's sports), eliminated men's soccer, gymnastics, and wrestling, and were still found non-compliant.

If self funded sports were excluded from the count, I would have little to no problem with this law, but men's sports at major universities subsidize women's sports to a huge amount, and still get eliminated.

I saw my wrestling conference shrink in the time I competed in college. It totally sucks to see the smaller men's sports squeezed out. It may make it tough for colleges to attract certain unique people that would be into those type of sports. It even affects D3 quite a bit, where scholarships are not even permitted for athletics.

based on overall uniqueness rather than their solely their ability to wrestle.

If I can pick two schools that are equal in most respects, but with one, Id have the opportunity to compete, its a hands down winner (despite other flaws) if thats an important aspect in my life.

Its not about one's ability to wrestle, but rather their desire to. Once you eliminate the program, you eliminate many people who would consider even attending.

I could of went to any university in the US. I chose one where I could have wrestled too.

to wrestle rather than kids who are interested in public service or an important industry is.......