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Enacted in 1972, Title IX outlaws gender discrimination at schools that receive
federal funding. But the landmark law initially faced stiff resistance: In June
1978, members of the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education staged
a "run-in" to protest delays in enforcing it.
Photograph by Mark Wilson, AP
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

 * History & Culture
 * Explainer




WOMEN FACED UNCHECKED DISCRIMINATION IN U.S. SCHOOLS—UNTIL TITLE IX

Despite initial resistance, the landmark civil rights law has transformed
opportunities for women in the 50 years since it was enacted.


ByErin Blakemore
Published March 3, 2022
• 8 min read
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During a landmark week in 1970, lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol bore witness to
the ugliest realities of an educational system that was anything but equal. They
listened to testimony from undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and
professional women who had been discouraged from participating in school
activities, laughed out of degree programs, and dissuaded from pursuing their
academic and professional passions. As the women’s testimonies made clear, sex
discrimination in higher education was a pernicious reality.

Ann Sutherland Harris, an assistant art history professor at Columbia University
at the time, was one of the women who testified at the hearings hosted by the
Congressional subcommittee tasked with investigating gender equality in higher
education. She explained that male faculty members told her female students
things like “You’re so cute. I can’t see you as a professor or anything,” “We
expect women who come here to be competent, good students, but we don’t expect
them to be brilliant or original,” and “Why don’t you find a rich husband and
give this all up?” It was all part and parcel of a reality Harris called
“psychological warfare.”

The hearings were the first step toward Title IX, a watershed law enacted in
June 1972 that outlawed gender discrimination in federally funded education and
opened up new opportunities for women in the decades that followed. Here’s how
the law was passed—and why it was so urgently needed to protect women who
endured harassment, discouragement, and discriminatory treatment at all levels
of education.

Opening opportunities

College degrees of all types

earned by men and women,

1969-2021, in millions

Women

Men

Doctorate

Master

Bachelor

Associate

1

1

2

0

2 million

1970

Title IX was signed into law 1972, that year women earned 41% of degrees.

1980

In 2000, an executive order prohibits discrimination in educational and training
programs.

1990

2000

2010

Women earned 59% of all college degrees in 2019.

2020

2

0

1

1

2

Patricia Healy and Rosemary Wardley,

NG Staff.

Sources: Claudia Buchmann, Ohio State U.

NCES Table 318.10 for 1969-2002 (2014),

2003-2021 (2020, 2020-21 numbers

projected), U.S. Dept. of Justice,

U.S. Courts


INCOMPLETE CIVIL RIGHTS PROTECTIONS

Title IX has its roots in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited
segregation and banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion,
sex, and national origin. Those protections applied to private employment and
public accommodations, but Title VI of the law, which applied to federally
funded entities like public schools, colleges, and universities, lacked
protections based on sex. This left women unprotected in most educational
contexts.

It showed: Women were regularly discriminated against in education. In primary
schools, girls were forbidden from being crossing guards and were excluded from
tasks like running projectors. Middle and high schools made home economics
classes compulsory for female students. Women were underrepresented both as
students and faculty members at institutes of higher education, comprising just
21 percent of college students in the mid-1950s. Some schools banned women from
applying or put restrictive quotas on how many they would accept.

When colleges did accept women, some had separate entrances for women and
gender-specific hallways. Girls’ sports teams were either nonexistent or poorly
funded—fewer than 300,000 girls participated in school sports nationwide.
Schools funneled women away from elite professions like medicine and law.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which extended
civil rights protections to government employees and federal contractors. But
that order didn’t include sex as a protected class—and women’s groups took note.

“We maintain that this country no longer can afford to waste the resources of
its women citizens,” wrote a representative of the newly formed National
Organization of Women in a 1966 letter to Johnson. It was just one of a flood of
letters asking the president to rectify the omission.


THE PUSH FOR TITLE IX BEGINS

Known as the "godmother of Title IX," Bernice Sandler fought tirelessly for
equal rights for women in education. In 1970, she filed a class-action lawsuit
against all the universities in the United States, an action that would
ultimately result in the creation of Title IX.
AP
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

Johnson finally added sex to the executive order in 1967. But it didn’t go far
enough for many activists. One of them was Bernice Sandler, a university
lecturer who was denied a promotion to one of her department’s full-time
positions at the University of Maryland in 1969 despite her qualifications. A
coworker told her why: “You come on too strong for a woman.”

Sandler was furious. Like many colleges and universities, the university held
federal contracts. She started investigating sex discrimination at the
university level and filed more than 250 comprehensive complaints with the
federal government against universities that had violated the executive order.

The sudden flurry of enforcement requests piqued the interest of Edith Green, an
educational policy expert and Democratic Congresswoman from Oregon. In 1970, she
launched hearings on sex discrimination at federally funded universities.

Persuaded by the testimonies put forth during the hearings, Representative Patsy
Mink of Hawaii joined Green in drafting legislation that would prohibit sex
discrimination in education. Their bill was introduced in the Senate by Indiana
Democrat Birch Bayh and passed as Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of
1972.


RESISTANCE TO TITLE IX

But the law met with fierce public resistance, even after its passage. Among the
critiques was the misconception that the law would impose quotas on the number
of women universities must admit. Another concern was that requiring
universities to create equal opportunities for women in sports would force them
to eliminate male-dominated sports like football or cancel existing programs if
universities failed to find enough interested, qualified female players for a
women’s team. This was not the case, however. The law itself made no mention of
sports, and its enforcement guidelines allow single-sex sports and do not
require defunding male-dominated sports to support opportunities for women.

But during the three-year gap between the law’s passage and the finalization of
enforcement guidelines, little was done to level the playing field for women—and
the most egregious examples of resistance to the law were often found in
university sports.

One of Title IX’s most vociferous opponents was the University of Michigan’s
athletic director, Don Canham, who lobbied U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, a
University of Michigan alumnus, to gut the provision and exempt athletics from
the law. When Canham didn’t get his wish, he retaliated by dragging his feet in
implementation. Women athletes at the University of Michigan were given inferior
locker rooms, coaches, and transportation, prohibited from holding practices at
convenient times, and even initially forbidden from wearing the same lettered
jackets as male athletes.

Eventually, though, the resistance by Canham and others only resulted in more
specific, and stringent, definitions of the law. The enforcement guidelines were
clarified in the wake of his opposition. They involve a test that requires
schools to follow at least one of three criteria: Either they have to have an
equal proportion between male and female students and student-athletes; have a
history of expanding protections to underrepresented students; or be “fully and
effectively accommodating the interests and abilities of the underrepresented
sex.”

Yet the University of Michigan continued to delay. It was the last university to
meet the law’s standards—and only did so in 1982, after a variety of complaints
of sex discrimination and an investigation that forced the university to admit
it was noncompliant.


TITLE IX’S LEGACY

Despite opposition over the years—and ongoing attempts to gut the law—Title IX
persisted. Along the way, it transformed women’s educational experiences. Today,
women outnumber men in college admissions and, armed with advanced degrees in
every conceivable field, participate in careers once considered out of their
reach. Girls and women’s athletics have ballooned, and women are employed at all
levels in schools and universities.

But there’s still inequity in education. Men hold a disproportionate number of
faculty positions, and second-class treatment is still standard in school
sports. In 2021, an external gender equity review of the NCAA found
“significant” gender disparities in college athletics, in part due to the
organization’s prioritization of revenue-producing sports like college football.
(Why women’s basketball still fights for equal recognition.)

Meanwhile, thousands of enforcement actions are still requested each year, most
of which relate to claims of sexual harassment, different treatment based on
sex, retaliation, and sexual violence. Title IX may be a fixture in civil rights
law, but there’s still progress to be made.

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