Michael Messner. . .Title IX on Trial

Editor's Note: Thirty years after its passage in to law, Title IX is widely credited with facilitating a dramatic growth in girls’ and women’s participation in high school and college sports. Critics of the law, though, claim that it has gone too far—that now some men athletes in sports like wrestling, gymnastics, and tennis face reverse discrimination. This Fall, the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on Opportunity in Athletics held a series of four “town hall meetings” to assess the future of Title IX. Equity activists, fearing that the Commission’s hearings are a prelude to a Bush Administration effort to take the enforcement teeth out of Title IX, showed up in great numbers to testify in favor of continued enforcement of the law. USC Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies Michael Messner contributed the following testimony at the final hearing, held in San Diego on November 20.

“Over the past twenty years, the bulk of my research has focused on gender and sports in the United States.

Nearly a century ago, there was a surge of female athleticism in this country. The subsequent backlash did not eliminate, but did manage to ghettoize, women’s sports for several decades. With the revival of feminism in the 1960s, this ghettoization was challenged on many fronts, and a crucial element of this challenge was the passage of Title IX. You and I have lived through a revolutionary social transformation. However, this is still an incomplete revolution: Today, female athletes too often do not receive equal opportunities, facilities, shares of scholarship funds, coaching-salary budgets, recruiting and operating budgets, or media coverage. I doubt that the tide of female athleticism will ever turn back to its pre-1970s state. However, I do think that we are at a key historical juncture; without continued vigilance at many levels—including rigorous enforcement of Title IX—we are in danger of moving toward new forms of ghettoization and marginalization of girls and women’s sports.

Some people have recently suggested that there is greater interest among male athletes than among female athletes, and that this can be seen in the larger numbers of males who join teams as walk-ons. When I heard this claim, I pitched it out to the several hundred scholars on the listserv of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. Every reply I received stated that, to their knowledge, there was no research that supported this claim. But several scholars also challenged the idea that it makes any sense at all to try to include an assessment of “interest” in deciding whether to offer equitable opportunities to girls and women in schools and universities. Our recent experiences—from pee wee soccer to NCAA athletics—should tell us that there is a reciprocal relationship between interest and opportunities, between supply and demand. Our job as educators is to supply equitable opportunities; when we do that, the girls and women come, they play, and they reap the benefits of sports that have traditionally been “owned” by the boys and men.

It is now a well-documented fact that athletic participation is good for the physical and social well-being of girls and women. I want to suggest something further: equity for girls and women in sports is also good for boys and men.

For me, this is a fundamental point—as a scholar of gender and sport, as a former athlete, and especially as the father of two young boys. One of the most unfortunate aspects of recent discussions about Title IX is the way that the debate is framed as pitting the interests of boys and men against those of girls and women. I don’t see it this way. My sons are growing up in a world in which they can expect to work alongside women as colleagues. And there is a good chance that they will have women bosses. How well are our schools preparing them for this? Despite the feminist movement, my sons still experience—often daily— a sea of cultural imagery, institutional contexts, and peer group dynamics that encourage them to see women narrowly as sexual objects, as support objects, as weak, subordinate, and second class citizens. Too often, these kinds of views are reinforced through boys’ experiences in sports. Sexist attitudes, of course, hurt girls and women, and impede their hopes of equal treatment as adults. But sexism also dehumanizes boys and men, and will make it difficult for them to function effectively as adults in a world where gender equity is the rule. If these boys and men are to grow up to respect women as colleagues and leaders, it is crucial that, early on, they see and experience girls and women’s full range of strength, skill, and assertiveness. The physical realm of athletics is an essential dimension of this. Schools that deny girls and women equal opportunities in sports are also denying boys and men access to the range of experiences that they need to rise above the lingering misogyny that still discolors the daily experiences of so many of us.

For the good of our daughters and our sons, I urge you to support the continued enforcement of Title IX.”