Good Sports? - women take center stage

Reason, Nov, 2001 by Cathy Young

Despite continuing Title IX controversy, women are having a ball.

As summer ended this year, worn en took center stage at the U.S. Open tennis tournament; the Women's National Basketball Association crowned a new champion, the Los Angeles Sparks; and the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), an offspring of the spectacular success of the 1999 Women's World Cup, held its first-ever championship game, in front of a crowd more than 21,000 strong.

The popularity of women's sports is a widely hailed trend-but, like anything related to gender, it provokes controversy.

It's an article of faith among advocates of women's sports that the remarkable growth in women's athletics over the past quarter century has been the fruit of Title IX, the 1972 federal law that requires parity in funding for school-based male and female sports. By the same token, critics of interventionist government often view the women's sports phenomenon as a product of statist social engineering. They too zero in on Title IX, claiming that it is the apotheosis of ideological overreach. They point to recent interpretations of Title IX that essentially mandate equal rates of athletic participation for male and female students regardless of actual interest levels--and that achieve parity less by expanding women's sports programs and more by cutting men's. (See "Title IX's Pyrrhic Victory," REASON, April.)

Even most Title IX supporters tend to agree that this less-for-everyone approach to gender equity has been a disaster, bringing the ax down on many excellent men's gymnastics, soccer, and wrestling teams. However, they make a strong case that most of the blame rests with the reluctance of college administrators to touch the bloated budgets and inflated rosters of football programs. Given the seamy side of lucrative men's scholastic sports programs--including abysmally high dropout rates and a tendency to wink at cheating and criminal behavior by "student" athletes--seeing men's sports squeezed a bit to create opportunities for women might not be such a cause for mourning.

What's more, in some areas, particularly on the pre-college level, there remain tangible inequities in the treatment of boys' and girls' sports in such matters as locker facilities, funding for road trips and athletic equipment, and the like. Of course, these disparities largely reflect the undisputed fact that there is less interest in girls' games, but lower interest and lower investment tend to become a vicious circle. If nothing else, Title IX has clearly had an "if you build it, they will come" effect.

One may well point out that the state shouldn't be in the business of furthering cultural change in attitudes toward women's sports. But when it comes to opportunities in the public sector, such an argument is difficult to sustain, especially given the massive amount of public money spent on sports. And, sometimes, the legacy of girls' past exclusion results in fairly glaring present injustices--such as girls' softball teams being denied access to the best public playing fields because of a seniority system that gives preference to boys' baseball teams simply because they have been around longer.

It's hard to tell how much credit Title IX should actually get for the growth of women's sports. In 1971, prior to the passage of this law, girls made up about 5 percent of high school athletes. Today, they make up nearly 40 percent. But the influx of women into other formerly male bastions, such as medical and law schools, has been equally spectacular without any government mandates. Given the cultural changes of the past 30 years, the popularity of girls' and women's sports would have skyrocketed, with or without government intervention. As Fred Barnes noted in The Weekly Standard in 1999, when Women's World Cup mania led to endless paeans to Title IX, girls' soccer was jumpstarted in the 1970s and early '80s by private associations more than public school varsity teams. That was back in the days when Title IX was only haphazardly enforced.

A few conservatives' suspiciousness of women's sports goes beyond the issue of Title IX and intrusive government. In a 2000 Washington Times column, Stephen Moore voiced the opinion that top women tennis players didn't deserve to be paid as much as their male counterparts--even if the pay was based on market economics--because they couldn't compete against the men. Moore also suggested that the solution to questions of gender equity in scholastic sports was to make high school and college teams unisex and select the best talent, male or female. Interestingly, in a column two years earlier, he had griped that co-ed peewee soccer leagues were "doing irreparable harm to the psyche of America's little boys" because at that age, girls can often beat them. Apparently, unisex sports are all right only when the outcome is that girls will not only get trounced but, in most cases, get no chance to play at all.

In a few cases, right-wing broadsides against women's sports are explicitly based on a distaste for the transgression of traditional gender roles. The most striking example is Debbie Schlussel, a Detroit attorney and a columnist for WorldNetDaily.com, who makes no bones about her belief that women should be making money as fashion models and should leave athletics to men. Her most recent diatribe on the subject beats the drum about the allegedly high quotient of lesbians in the WNBA. (Full disclosure: After Schlussel and I clashed over women's sports two years ago, she accused me of plagiarizing from one of her columns--charges that were rejected by my editors at two newspapers and by a media critic who examined the controversy.)