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When Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was passed, no one involved had sports on their mind. U.S. Senator from Indiana Birch Bayh, who helped win passage of the amendment, was asked during Senate hearings if Title IX would mean that women and men would share dormitories or other facilities on college campuses. Bayh assured his fellow senators that this would not be the case, and that the bill would not involve the desegregation of football fields or locker rooms. Senator Peter Dominick of Colorado responded with a joke that if football were gender-integrated when he was an undergraduate, he would have had a lot more fun playing. Despite the radical way Title IX ended up transforming sports, that brief exchange was the extent of any conversations about the implications Title IX might have for athletics before the bill was passed.^[22]

That snippet of question and answer from the Senate hearing demonstrates the attitude women were up against during this time period. Senator Dominick’s joke clearly implies that the only good reason to have women on a sports team would be their entertainment value for men. It also suggests that the idea to gender-integrate football teams wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility, even if it would take another 26 years before that vision came true. It wasn’t until 1997 that a woman played on a college football team (Liz Heaston kicked for Willamette University, and is believed to be the first woman to ever score points in a college football game).^[23] But Title IX would completely transform the terrain of sports in the United States by opening up new opportunities for women and girls. Before the passage of Title IX, there were 313,000 girls and women playing college and high school sports in the United States. Forty years later, there were over 3 million women and girls in the fields and on the courts.^[24]

The fascinating truth about Title IX is that it very much slipped through the cracks as a piece of legislation, with many of those involved completely oblivious to its potential effects. Patsy Mink was one of the principal authors of Title IX. Mink was a Japanese American woman who represented Hawaii in the House of Representatives. She had experienced gender discrimination in the sports world as well as in the larger arena of education addressed by Title IX. These experiences shaped her commitment to gender and racial equality. She played basketball for Maui High School, but her team was never allowed to play full court because that much running would be too arduous for girls, consistent with notions that overexertion was dangerous for women. Mink was rejected from medical school 12 times due to what she believed was gender discrimination. She went on to attend law school but continued to face discrimination, turned down for jobs at law firms because she was a married woman. Along with Edith Green, a U.S. Representative from Oregon, and Senator Birch Bayh, Mink was instrumental in the writing and passage of the bill, as well as the later struggles over how Title IX would be interpreted.^[25]

The strategy that Green, Mink, and Bayh pursued in getting Title IX passed was to say as little as possible about it and hope no one noticed the bill. The entire act is a mere 37 words that got tucked into a larger, omnibus education law. In its entirety, Title IX reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” That’s it, and that’s not a lot of words for such a groundbreaking piece of legislation.

In fact, those who worked to get Title IX passed hoped that it was so short that most of the congresspeople voting for it wouldn’t notice it at all. Bernice Sandler, a women’s rights activist who worked with Green to get Title IX passed, told Green she was going to lobby for the bill. Green told Sandler not to meet with congresspeople to attempt to convince them to vote for Title IX for fear people would ask questions about the bill. If they asked questions, Green told Sandler, they’d find out what Title IX could really do. Green reasoned that if people found out what the full implications of Title IX might be, they’d never vote for it. Due in part to Green’s strategy, one of the most important pieces of legislation related to gender equality slipped through Congress without much notice.^[26]

Green was correct about the effects Title IX would have. Once Title IX was implemented, a whole new generation of girls and women grew up with expanded educational opportunities. This extended to all areas of education, but the bill’s application to sports was especially dramatic. Before Title IX, girls made up only 7 percent of all high school athletes while today, two in five high school girls play sports.^[27] Today, women make up 42 percent of all college athletes.^[28] Women’s sports take up 40 percent of college athletic budgets on average, a number that’s still not equal, but much closer than pre–Title IX figures.^[29]

In curtailing gender discrimination in education, Title IX is also partly responsible for huge gains in academic achievement for women and girls. Women now graduate at higher rates at all educational levels—high school, college, and graduate school. White women and women from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds are doing better relative to women of color and working-class women, so Title IX didn’t erase racial and social class inequalities that overlap with gender.^[30] That work isn’t yet complete, as we’ll discuss in chapter 3, but unlike Patsy Mink, women today are less likely to be denied admission to medical school based solely on their gender.

These transformations due to Title IX didn’t happen all at once. It took Congress, along with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, several years to figure out exactly what Title IX would mean. Regulations about how the law would be applied didn’t begin to circulate until 1975, and final guidelines weren’t in place until 1979. But eventually, and despite Congresswoman Green’s desire to fly under the radar, those with power in the sports world began to realize how Title IX would matter for them. Even though sports programs didn’t directly receive money from the federal government, the colleges and universities where those programs were located did. Title IX meant that athletic programs would be covered, and this realization began to make athletic directors nervous about the fate of their male sports programs—especially football, whose large teams make achieving gender balance difficult. Some athletic programs began to make plans for how they might resist or circumvent Title IX requirements. The first such move was to work for an exemption for revenue-generating sports. With this loophole, sports programs that made money for the school—like elite college football and basketball teams—would be exempt from Title IX. Those attempts to exclude money-making college sports ultimately failed.^[31]

It was also in these early discussions that the question was raised as to whether sports played in educational settings would continue to be gender-segregated. As Senator Bayh’s comment suggests, one potential solution to providing equal opportunities for women and men to play sports would be to create co-ed, or gender-integrated, teams. There was precedence for gender integration at the elementary and high school levels, where physical education classes were not gender-segregated. If girls and boys could go to gym class together, why couldn’t they play on the same sports teams?^[32]

Those in charge of implementing Title IX also discussed whether it would make more sense to organize sports on the basis of skill level rather than gender. Rather than having a boys basketball team and girls basketball team, there would be an A league, a B league, and a C league, with the A league featuring the most skilled players, regardless of gender. This system would resemble Major League Baseball’s farm system, or the way sports like wrestling and boxing match opponents on the basis of weight class.

Eventually these possibilities were discarded, and Congress decided that the best strategy would be to have gender-segregated sports at the collegiate level. Equality in opportunities for women to play sports would be achieved mostly through adding women’s sports teams. The controversial aspect of Title IX was that some schools decided that taking away a few men’s programs was easier than adding new programs for women. This strategy wasn’t dictated by any language in the law or how it was meant to be enforced, but it still generated hostility toward Title IX at those schools which employed it.