"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"
Essentially, all government funded services, events and programs must meet Title IX's requirements, ensuring that gender equality is achieved. While the changes brought by Title IX seem somewhat subtle in everyday life, the effects of Title IX have had the largest impact on collegiate athletics.
According to the NCAA, the purpose of Title IX is not to decrease athletic opportunities for men, but to equalize opportunities between both genders. With that being said, during a 20 year period between 1980-2000, at least 363 men's sports teams have been cut from a handful of schools nationwide. Some of the schools' sports that were cut included: wrestling, tennis, track, gymnastics and swimming. (Why did the athletes of 171 different wrestling programs have to be cut from the sport they loved, just because there was not a female version of the sport ensuring "equal opportunity"?) Although the intent of this may not have been to cut men's sports for the sake of cutting them, Title IX proved to be more successful in destroying men's athletics than equalizing them to their female counterpart.
On top of cutting programs, Title IX also limits team rosters in order to meet an acceptable ratio between men and women athletes in similar sports. Since equal opportunities must be given, team rosters must be restricted so it does not seem that the men's side is being favored by having a larger roster than the woman's side. Because of this, hundreds of student-athletes, annually, will be denied positions on their school's athletics squads, even if they were planning on joining as a walk-on athlete (meaning that the student-athlete receives no scholarship money).
The largest inequality that resulted from Title IX was the amount of differences created in athletic scholarship opportunities. For all sports that have men and women teams, the amounts of athletic scholarship available to the women's side is staggering to the amount available to men. In NCAA Division 1 Basketball, men's teams are allowed to split 11.7 scholarships among their athletes, while women's teams are allowed to give 15. In D1 Track & Field, men are allowed only 12.6 scholarships, while women are allowed 18 scholarships for their team. In D1 Men's Volleyball only 4.5 scholarships are allowed, while 12 scholarships are allowed to the women's side.
Although these facts and numbers do support that women's rights are being supported in athletics, they disprove any theories that gender equality is being practiced in collegiate athletics. With the implications of Title IX, men have become the minority in collegiate athletics.
