A field of nightmares: a number of male sports have been kicked off campus - cutting college sports teams for men to make room for women's sports under Title IX

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Jessica Gavora

Founded by tennis player Billie Jean King in 1974 in the after-glow of her victory over Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes," the WSF is the most powerful advocacy group for female athletes in the country. Like most women's groups, it has benefited from friendly press coverage. But unlike most women's groups, the WSF has made genuine heroes its public face: women like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Michelle Akers of the championship U.S. Women's World Cup soccer team; Kym Hampton and Rebecca Lobo of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA); two-rime heptathlon winner Jackie Joyner-Kersee, sprinter Gail Devers, swimmer Summer Sanders, and gold-medal-winning gymnast Dominique Moceanu. This strategy of capitalizing on the popularity of female athletes has made the WSF a magnet for corporate giving. General Motors and Merrill Lynch are generous supporters. Representatives of Reebok, Mervyn's of California, and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association sit on its board of trustees. Their support allo ws the WSF to rake in additional contributions at a glittering gala each year in New York City and dole our more than $1 million a year in grants and scholarships to female athletes.

BUT BEHIND the appealing image of strong female athleticism that is the group's public face, the Women's Sports Foundation pursues a relentlessly political agenda: to turn the grant of opportunity for women guaranteed under Title IX into a grant of preference. Under the leadership of its street-fighting executive director, Donna Lopiano, a former All-American softball player and the former womens athletic director at the University of Texas, the WSF has done more than any other group to convince colleges and universities that compliance with Title IX means manipulating the numbers of male and female athletes.

Lopiano, who calls those who disagree with her version of equity "dinosaurs," came to the WSF in 1992 fresh from Austin, where she was instrumental in fomenting a landmark Title IX lawsuit against her own university for its failure to achieve proportionality. Lopiano was the first to admit that Texas wasn't guilty of any bias against women, only a failing to give them the preferences she believes they deserve.

The Texas case was a landmark because up to that point, court victories won by female athletes to create Title IX quotas had been limited to mandating the reinstatement of teams that had been cut. The Lopiano-inspired Texas case, in contrast, demanded that women's teams be added to fill the gender quota. Thanks to revenues brought in by Longhorn football, Texas had a bigger women s athletic budget than any other two schools in its conference combined. Still, female athletic participation--the responsibility of the recently departed Lopiano--was stuck at around 23 percent in the early 1990s. So even though the administration was already in the process of adding two women's sports, it settled before the case got to court, agreeing to reach proportionality by the 1995-96 academic year. Additional women's teams were added while non-scholarship male athletes--who, by outnumbering female non-scholarship athletes eighty-one to one, accounted for much of Texas' "Title IX gap"--were cut.