Tilting the playing field : schools, sports, sex, and Title IX /

Conceived by Congress as a means of prohibiting sex discrimination in educational institutions (from elementary schools to colleges and universities) that receive federal financial assistance, Title IX continues to be a lightning rod in educational, political, and, now, athletic circles. For its advocates in the world of women's sports, Title IX ensures women both equal opportunity to participate on athletic teams and the assurance of proportional distributions of financial and other resources. It is a wake-up call for athletic departments, which are often wholly owned subsidiaries of football and men's basketball on campuses. For its opponents, including Gavora, Title IX is another federal government quota program--it is overseen by the Office of Civil Rights with the US Department of Education--that, irrespective of women's underlying interests in sports and bereft of common sense, mandates and enforces gender equity, social engineering, and political correctness. Gavora charges that activists with a particular agenda, most notably liberal feminists, have been extraordinarily successful at co-opting public officials, the media, and educational associations, and also at stifling debate. Though Favor's book is neither the definite word nor an objective one, her historical review, documented accounts, and alternative proposal will provide good grist in the ongoing debates on these contentious matters. Upper-division undergraduates and above A. R. Sanderson University of Chicago

Here are two very different takes on the controversial issue of gender equity in collegiate sports. When Pemberton joined Oregon's Linfield College as assistant athletic director for women's sports in 1989, she had never heard of Title IX, a 1972 constitutional amendment prohibiting the discrimination between men and women in the allotment of funds for education. But Title IX would change her life. She soon discovered that women's sports at Linfield were treated anything but equally to men's, even to the point that women athletes had to pay for their own uniforms. Pemberton's fight to make her school comply with the law would alienate her from almost all her colleagues and would make her, against her will, a celebrity. This precise recounting of Pemberton's legal battle makes an excellent case study, but it doesn't address the larger questions that Title IX has prompted: specifically, whether the legislation, which never specifically mentions sports, was meant to be used in the ways it is being used today. Gavora's Tilting the Playing Field tackles these weighty questions but from a very definite point of view. She makes much of the fact that Title IX doesn't specifically address sports, and she notes that the often-invoked premise (by Pemberton, among others) that a school's sports program should reflect the male-female ratio of its student body is not in line with what Title IX was designed to provide. As long as such a ratio gap is not based on any discriminatory practices, it is not in violation of any equity legislation. What many Title IX activists fail to take into account, Gavora says, is that, in many schools, there are more men interested in sports than there are women. Title IX, the author believes, has been so disastrously twisted and abused that it no longer is used to do the thing it was designed to do: redress genuine cases of discrimination. Taken together, these two books provide a useful and thought-provoking look at both sides of a complex and contentious issue. --David Pitt