Recently, an informal coalition of college coaches lobbied Congress to weaken the guidelines that schools use to measure their compliance with Title IX, part of the 1972 Educational Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bars discrimination against women in sports programs. In recent years, male athletes have brought suits against Title IX, faulting the law aimed at gender equity with eliminating opportunities for men in sports. Coaches are opposed to the laws “proportionality” guideline which considers schools in compliance if they have the same ratio of female athletes as female students, and want to drop this measure. Male athletes at Brown University, Illinois State University, and California State University at Bakersfield sued their schools, arguing that men’s teams were cut because of Title IX. The Supreme Court rejected Brown’s case.
Women’s sports still receive less than 1/3 of the operating costs that men’s sports receive on the university level, and the recruiting budget for women’s sports is only 30% of the recruiting budget for male sports.
