The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights received more than 3,600 complaints over disparities in athletic opportunities for boys and girls during its most recent fiscal years, according to a new report from the federal agency.
The complaints cover all levels of public education, from primary to post-secondary, and the report shows that during the 2013–2014 fiscal years, a majority of the more than 5,000 complaints OCR received under Title IX, the law meant to guarantee equal educational access to boys and girls in public schools, related to athletics.
The report highlights an incredible increase in the sheer number of Title IX complaints, which are up across the board. But the spikes have been especially large in two areas that have received increased attention in recent years: athletics and sexual violence.
OCR previously reported receiving just more than 900 Title IX complaints related to athletics from 2009 to 2011, just a quarter of the athletics-related complaints from 2013–2014. Another OCR report said that it received more than 1,250 complaints over a four-year period from 2009 to 2012. The number of sexual violence complaints increased from 786 during the three-year period ending in 2011 to 854 in 2013–2014.
When it comes to athletics, the OCR report details three specific instances of enforcement that highlight the types of issues that have been raised. In one complaint, it ruled that Portland (ME) schools were not providing equal opportunities to girls, and that while the district’s baseball teams played at a professional-quality minor league stadium, girls’ softball teams played at “local, poorer-quality fields.” In another, it found that an Indianapolis school district did not provide equal opportunities to girls while also failing to provide “equal access to practice and competitive facilities, locker rooms, equipment and supplies, and the scheduling of games and practice times at some high schools.”
That girls and women still aren’t receiving equal opportunities or protections under the law is “not at all surprising,” said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a civil rights lawyer and former Olympian who is now the chief executive of Champion Women, a group that advocates for women’s equality in sports. Indeed, the OCR report is the latest to detail the remaining shortcomings of Title IX, which despite its success in increasing athletics opportunities for girls and women still hasn’t achieved gender parity in schools. Previous OCR reports have shown that girls make up roughly half of high school students but have just 41 percent of the spots on varsity sports teams; women make up 57 percent of college students but, similarly, just 43 percent of the positions on collegiate athletic teams. The Department of Education in February ordered New York City to add more than 3,000 athletic spots for girls, while a recent report found that existing disparities can be even worse for girls and women of color.
“There’s no new news. We have a very strong statute, the regulations that interpret that statute are really clear, and we have case law that says unequivocally and repeatedly that equal means equal,” Hogshead-Makar said. “And yet you have, every way you measure it, these great big disparities.”
Even if it might not be groundbreaking to point out that Title IX has fallen short or that schools have failed to fully comply, the likeliest explanation for the rapid increase in complaints is that there has been much more attention devoted to those shortcomings in recent years, said Scott Lewis, a partner at The NCHERM Group, a law and consulting firm that advises schools and campuses on various policies, including Title IX.
Concerted efforts to call attention to sexual violence on college campuses — including a Dear Colleague letter to campuses from OCR, headline cases involving both star athletes and prestigious schools — have helped drive awareness of Title IX’s role in such cases, and the number of complaints has been on the rise for years. In athletics, meanwhile, the law’s 40th anniversary in 2013, which followed the success of women athletes on huge stages (Lewis pointed to the 2012 London Olympics, where women made up a majority of the American Olympic team and won more medals than their male counterparts, as one example) brought more attention to the law’s successes and to the ground it has left uncovered. Outside organizations too have made a push to file complaints on behalf of girls and women across the country.
All of this has made girls and women more aware of the disparities, and “with more awareness comes more complaints,” Lewis said. “Particularly with athletics, we’re seeing a very empowered group of young women. They are looking at their male counterparts and saying, ‘Wait a second.’ And they are more willing to ask those questions. They’re more sophisticated athletes, willing to exercise those rights.”
In that way, the recent explosion in complaints is “absolutely a good thing,” at least in the short-term, Lewis said. It means that women and girls and those acting on their behalf (anyone can file a Title IX complaint with OCR), are more aware of the disparate treatment they are getting, the rights they have and the methods available to enforce them. The most recent report thus paints a more accurate picture of the problems that remain, and that in theory should force more schools to comply and reduce the number of complaints.
They are more willing to ask those questions…to exercise those rights.
Increased attention and enforcement from OCR should also help. The question Hogshead-Makar’s organization and others are trying to address now, she said, is how to address the problems on a broad scale rather than on a case-by-case basis.
“The idea is, how do you get change to scale?” she said. “We do the one-offs. But one-offs inform the bigger projects of how you get change to scale.”
Champion Women and other groups are working to inform schools that are non-compliant of their problems and how widespread the problems are. The hope is to shine light on the disparities not just for athletics officials but for everyone involved on campuses in a way that will drive awareness of the scale of the problem. While enforcement from outside bodies, including OCR, is still necessary, the onus, ultimately, is on schools to follow a law they should already be in compliance with, Hogshead-Makar said.
“There’s nothing to argue about” when it comes to equal opportunities and facilities for girls and women, she said. “The law is not that hard.”