College Title IX Gender Equity Compliance Is a Failure, Feds Say
A report publicly released Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office confirmed the open secret of federal gender-equity laws related to college athletics: They are systematically violated and essentially unenforced.
The GAO report, unassumingly titled “Education Should Improve its Title IX Enforcement Efforts,” found that during the 2021-22 academic year, 93% of universities had female athletic participation rates lower than their enrollment rate, while 63% of schools had participation-enrollment gaps of 10% or more. Overall, the athletic participation rate for collegiate women was 14% less than their enrollment rate. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination from schools that receive “federal financial assistance.” To date, no school has ever had their funding pulled on account of being Title IX noncompliant, nor been sued by the federal government.
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The report also took to task the federal sub-agency responsible for overseeing Title IX compliance—the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights—concluding it has made only limited use of available Title IX data in its oversight purposes and is slow in its monitoring processes. GAO based that conclusion on a review of OCR case management data from 2008 to 2022. Even when schools entered into formal agreements to improve Title IX compliance, OCR routinely dragged its feet to provide feedback. For example, in 10 of 26 cases GAO reviewed, the Office of Civil Rights took more than a year to review and approve a school’s plans to get into compliance; in five cases, OCR went silent for over five years.
“This report confirms the sad, shameful truth,” said Arthur Bryant, an attorney with the firm Bailey Glasser, who has represented both female and male athletes in gender equity lawsuits against schools like San Diego State, Clemson and Oregon. “Most colleges in America are violating Title IX and depriving women of equal opportunities to participate in intercollegiate athletics. The federal government isn’t enforcing the law and making them comply like it should. So this illegal sex discrimination is continuing. If girls and women want it to stop, they have to be willing to stand up, fight, and sue.”
The GOA report, which was finalized last month, comes a half century after the adoption of Title IX and at a time when public interest in and appreciation for women’s college sports has never been greater. Thanks to the phenomenon of former Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark, TV and streaming viewership of the women’s Division I NCAA basketball championship topped that of the men’s for the first time. Last August, Nebraska volleyball set a world record for women’s sports when over 92,000 fans packed into Memorial Stadium in Lincoln to watch the hometown Huskers beat in-state rival Omaha.
Despite these positive datapoints, the GOA report underscores the deeper and broader challenge faced by women seeking equal treatment in college athletic departments.
According to the GAO, mid-sized colleges with between 1,000 and 4,000 students were “somewhat more likely” to have a larger gap in female athletic-enrollment rates. Schools that sponsored football were also a little worse than those that didn’t when it came to athletic gender equity for women. However, in general, NCAA Division I schools were less likely to have a lower athletic participation rate for women compared to those members in smaller NCAA divisions.
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