Today’s guest columnist is Pamela Seidenman, founder and executive director of Accelerate Equity.
Most people believe that female college sports deserve fair treatment. But they don’t get it – and it’s not even close. As reported in Sporticothe U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) just released a report on college sports showing that 93% of all colleges do not provide women with proportionate opportunities to participate in sports, one of the goals of Title IX. It also found that the Department of Education, which is tasked with ensuring that schools treat men and women equally and comply with Title IX, is failing in its job. While these problems have been around for a long time and threaten to worsen due to revenue sharing, there are some new solutions.
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How big is this? Women had more than 300,000 opportunities to play college sports (placing on teams with the NCAA, NAIA and other sanctioning bodies) in 2021-2022. If they had had opportunities proportional to their registration, they would have had more than 500,000 spots on teams. In short, more than 200,000 female athletes missed the opportunity to compete in intercollegiate athletics that academic year. Furthermore, there would have been millions more in athletic scholarships if women had been given a fair share of spots on teams. This has a huge impact on who can afford to go to college, which in turn impacts lifelong health and earnings.
The lack of enforcement by the Department of Education explains why so many colleges ignore the law completely, with no consequences – unless students get fed up and file a lawsuit.
But there is another reason for this continued discrimination, and it can be solved. Few are aware of the extent and magnitude of inequality. Every year, colleges must report to the Ministry of Education on sports participation and expenditure, broken down by gender. This data is publicly available: in a spreadsheet more than 500 columns wide. That’s not exactly user-friendly. The result is that there is no transparency into how a university treats its female athletes. In fact, hundreds of colleges are reporting non-compliance with Title IX, and nothing is happening.
When I realized that the lack of transparency was a huge barrier to achieving fair treatment for female athletes, I created a Gender Equity Dashboard using the data that colleges report to the Department of Education. The Dashboard makes it easy to understand that treatment at the individual university level. Do women get a fair share of spots on teams and athletic scholarships? How do spending on recruitment and total spending on men’s and women’s sports compare? With the Dashboard you can quickly find the answers for every university. It also explains how Title IX works and what actions everyone can take to help female athletes get the equality they deserve.
Fans, students, athletes and alumni can do what the government has not done. The popularity of women’s sports, the growing influence of the women’s sports industry, and the transparency the Dashboard brings make this the moment when Title IX’s promise of equality can be realized. Yes, there are other complex issues in college athletics. But this issue deserves as much oxygen as conversations about revenue sharing, NIL and collectives. Moreover, it is intertwined. The pressure on athletic budgets from revenue sharing further threatens women’s sports and the opportunity to play college sports does NOT provide financial opportunity.
I encourage everyone to spread the word that there is still tremendous inequality in women’s college sports. Share data from the gender equality dashboard. Contact your university if they can do better and let them know this is an important issue to you. If your university does a good job, thank them and let them know you care. The alternative? Turning our backs on hundreds of thousands of young women and allowing more than fifty years of gender discrimination to continue unchecked.
I bet we’ve reached the point where enough sports fans are willing to make their voices heard and insist that colleges treat female athletes fairly.
Pamela Seidenman is the founder and director of Accelerate equity, which is committed to ensuring fair treatment in women’s college sports. She grew up in Baltimore playing lacrosse and hockey, played ice hockey at Penn and the University of Cambridge, and started playing Ultimate Frisbee when she moved to California.
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