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Today’s lead editorial in The Times-Dispatch discusses the way in which Title IX, a law intended to guarantee equal opportunity to women, has been distorted so badly that it now denies opportunities to men: If an insufficient number of college women go out for sports at a particular school, men’s sports programs often get eliminated in order to maintain numerical parity in men’s and women’s athletics.
The problem would not occur if (a) women went out for sports in equal numbers, or (b) courts and federal agencies recognized that women do not go out for sports in equal numbers.
That women in the aggregate are simply less interested in sports is viewed, by some, as a sexist proposition. They maintain it is only socially constructed gender roles, not inherent gender differences, that accounts for lower female participation in sports—as evidenced by the fact that, since Title IX passed, female participation in athletics has increased. Could be.
The elephant in the living room of this discussion is the question as to why a society in pursuit of perfectly equal opportunity maintains separate athletic programs for men and women. True, there are significant differences in male and female athletic ability. But there are also significant differences in athletic ability within each gender. (That sometimes leads to teams with a stark racial imbalance, which doesn’t seem to bother anyone.) We make no allowance for the fact that the sixth-fastest male will get cut from a five-man track team because he lacks sufficient fast-twitch muscle fiber. Why do we make an allowance for women so great as to set up a completely separate team?
The point here is not to draw any firm conclusion one way or the other about the wisdom of gender integration of sports teams. But whenever the subject of Title IX comes up the question hovers in the shadows, patiently awaiting illumination.
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