Choosing Up Sides More Fairly

Think of it as The Field of Dreams Theory of Social Change: If you build it, they will come.

In this case, the tool used by the dreamers and builders was Title IX. And the athletes who have showed up on the playing fields newly created are not mythological figures. They are myth-shattering girls and women.

On June 23, we officially marked the 25th anniversary of the landmark legislation that banned sex discrimination in education. In honor of the event, the president quite properly reminded a pre-silver-anniversary crowd assembled in the White House last week that the federal legislation helped women in all areas of academic life, not just athletics.

But it’s not surprising that Title IX has been most visibly and powerfully associated with women in sports. This is where the change has been most visible. And where the opposition has remained most tenacious.

In the history of sports, women athletes once carried extra burdens as heavy as the 30 pounds of clothing - floor-length skirts and button-top shoes - worn by a 1910 Vassar College baseball player. They carried the social burden that said sports weren’t feminine.

There was always a handful of superstars who managed to overcome the odds. The indomitable Babe Didrikson Zaharias for example was asked by a journalist in the 1940s, “Is there anything at all you don’t play?” “Yeah,” she answered. “Dolls.”

But as long as dolls and basketballs, dolls and baseballs, were at cultural odds, most girls sat out the struggle. Schools kept them on the sidelines cheerleading.

In 1972, Title IX was passed in the name of fairness. Why pay the tax dollars so our sons could play but not our daughters? But on a deeper level, the legislation was also about changing sex roles and self-images.

All in all, the change has been remarkable. In the time it took a grade school girl of 1972 to become a soccer mom of 1997, girls’ sports exploded. Before Title IX, one out of 27 high school girls played sports. Now it’s one out of three. Before Title IX, there was $100,000 in sports scholarships available to female college athletes. Now there’s $180 million.

“What was barely a dream for my generation, is an expectation for the next,” says Mary Jo Kane who teaches women and sports at the University of Minnesota. “Instead of saying, ‘I hope there’s a team for me to play on,’ they say, ‘I hope I can make the team.”’

We built it and they are still coming.

But the playing field is not yet truly level. There is barely a school in the country in which the proportion of women athletes matches the proportion of women students.

Colleges budget about 25 cents on women’s sports for every dollar spent on men. They award women about one third of the athletic scholarship dollars awarded men. Indeed, in “honor” of this silver anniversary, the National Women’s Law Center filed complaints against 25 colleges.

The opposition is also surviving. From the very beginning, a composite including coaches and congressmen argued that The Field of Dreams Theory was an illusion. Some colleges fought Title IX in and out of the Supreme Court, arguing that females just aren’t as interested in sports as males - even as that female interest soared with every opportunity.

They have also argued, bitterly, that the expansion of women’s sports comes at the expense of men’s sports. But as a Women’s Sports Foundation study points out this week, college men’s sports programs have actually increased. The only schools that show any cuts are, ironically, the richest: Division I-A and I-AA. In some of these schools, football, the sacred cow, has become a cash hog, eating money that might be shared.

It does seem that the opposition to full equality in sports has less to do with football and dolls than guys and dolls. As Sheila Tobias, author of “Faces of Feminism,” believes, women athletes, like women warriors, strike at the heart of gender identity - how we define men and women.

Sports, she says, “has challenged age-old views of what is normal for males and normal for females. The qualities it takes to make a woman an athlete - go for the jugular, learn to be a team player, learn to be a leader - conflict with old ideas. The bottom line is that once women are as strong and confident physically as they can be, they won’t be pushovers.”

This may be the real success story of Title IX. Out there on the field of dreams, there are palpably fewer pushovers. Sugar and spice has made room for sweat and muscle. The game is by no means over, but girls now have a sporting chance.