Women's Sports - The Battle For Equality

The Battle For Equality

Today, the battle for equality between men's and women's sports rages on. Women make up 54% of enrollment at 832 schools that responded to an NCAA gender equity study in 2000, however, females at these institutions only account for 41% of the athletes. This violates Title IX's premise that the ratio of female athletes to male athletes should be roughly equivalent to the overall proportion of female and male students. Many of the issues today often revolve around the amount of money going into men and women's sports. According to 2000-2001 figures, men's college programs still have many advantages over women's in the average number of scholarships (60.5%), operating expenses (64.5%), recruiting expenses (68.2%) and head coaching salaries (59.5%). Other forms of inequality are in the coaching positions. Before Title IX, women coached 90% of women's teams, in 1978 that percentage dropped to 58, and in 2004 it dropped even more to 44 percent. In 1972, women administered 90 percent of women's athletic programs, in 2004 this fell to 19 percent and also in 2004 18 percent of all women's programs had no women administrators. The most startling statistics is in 2004 there were 3356 administrative jobs in NCAA women's athletic programs and of those jobs women held 35 percent of them. Today women are allowed to participate in every aspect of sports, but even in women athletic programs men are still outnumbering them. These statistics show that while Title IX has gotten rid of the discrimination against females participating in sports, there is not equality.