Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX

Title IX sounds like a good idea -- who on earth would be in favor of discrimination against women in education?Of course, as with every road to Hell, it's the UNINTENDED consequences that get you. In the case of Title IX, Ms. Gavora lucidly and compellingly documents what the unintended consequences have been: Title IX has been used to assault collegiate men's athletic programs.But wait, you say. Surely you must be in favor of increased opportunities for women, even if that means fewer opportunities for men! Isn't that fair?Well, it sure sounds fair -- but that isn't what Title IX is being used to do. The gender totalitarians enforcing Title IX have introduced into it the notion that it requires gender parity, or even that funding of and participation in athletic programs need to be distributed on the same gender proportions as general university enrollment.So universities that have been unable to attract a sufficient number of women athletes -- universities where spots on women's teams sit unfilled because of lack of applicants -- have cut thriving and even self-funded men's programs to get their women-men ratio to the right level. In other words, Title IX is being used to reduce the opportunities for men to play college sports even where no new opportunities for women are created or where women patently do not want those opportunities.What woman actually want does not matter to these gender militants. What matters is that men's athletics programs must be smashed to bits, and the Federal government, levered into play with Title IX, is the biggest stick around.Ms. Gavora is an excellent and convincing writer and this is an important and honest book.

For those that want to understand what has truly gone wrong with title ix interpretations, read this book. For others that refuse to believe that the media has been duped into believing that the application of gender quotas in academia is only for the good it doesn't matter what they read.Jessica Gavora provides a well-written book that describes, in detail, what happens when well-intentioned federal legislation is molded by those with an agenda. The result is a policy that forces addition by subtraction in athletics. Males are routinely eliminated from sports, with few additional women's opportunities created. All in the name of "gender equity." The carnage of lost opportunities, for both genders, is appalling to those of us closely familiar with college athletics. This book is destined to become classic reading for anyone who wants to know the truth.

Those other reviewers obviously didn't read the book. Gavora puts together a solid and interesting argument about Title IX and gender bias in the college sports arena -- don't just dismiss her position off-hand because you disagree.

These "comically slanted" reviews point out once again that when confronted by fair and balanced reporting, those whose agenda is threatened will attack and attempt to discredit the source of their discomfort rather than offer a thoughtful rebuttal. Obviously, Gavora's book runs counter to their agenda with her well-documented examination of the "unintended consequences" of a law designed to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex under federally funded education programs. While giving credit to Title IX, she shows why this law has outlived its usefulness. For the women's movement to really gain ground, she points out, credit for accomplishment should be given to a woman's talent, hard-work and dedication instead of diminishing that success by shackling it to a federal mandate. She contrasts the original intent of the law with what it has become. This is not just a critique of the female to male ratio quota in college sports, but a warning of what will happen as Title IX moves across the whole of education, into the classrooms, student testing and sexual harassment law. It's a frightening numbers game with an ominous forecast. If we mandate an equal number of female athletes to male athletes, why not the same quota system for all areas traditionally holding more interest for men than for women?

This is a brave and searching book. The author has revealed one of the dirty litte secrets of the current sports scene--how hardline feminists, who could give a fig about athletes or athletics, have seized control of the amateur sports scene in this country through Title IX. This law began as a good thing: insuring equal opportunity to participate. But like affirmative action, whose kissing cousin it is, Title IX has become a nasty little gender maneuver whose ultimate consequence, as Gavora documents so indisputably, is the death of one college men's sports program after another so that women, who choose not to participate in numbers equal to their growing percentage of college enrollment, can have "proportionality." Gavora shows, moreover, that Title IX had nothing to do with the U.S. Women's Soccer team's victory over China, nor with the superb play of the WNBA. This is an important book that ought to be read be everyone who is tempted to repeat the brainwashed mantras about how Title IX has helped women. It ought to be read also by anyone frightened, as I am, by the hardline feminists' growing use of Title IX in education (if we have to have exactly the same number of men and women athletes, why not exactly the same number of mathematicians and physicists?) and the growth industry of sex harrassment.