Happy 40th Anniversary Title IX: From Girls' Sports to Women's Wages

[seabeyond]

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Title IX, the law that made discrimination between men’s and women’s educational programs illegal. Its widest impact has been expanding girls’ and women’s sports in high school and college, creating the impetus for greater professional opportunities for female athletes. These are great achievements and we should celebrate them.

Less widely discussed and just as critical are the economic effects of these expanded opportunities.

Namely, economists have long observed that participation in sports at a young age correlates to higher wages, greater educational attainment and overall professional success in adult life. But for a while, there was no way of telling whether that correlation was causal – sports making young people into better workers – or the result of a selection effect, where the people who are going to be good athletes already possess the traits (teamwork, competitive instincts) that will make them good employees.

Title IX effectively required schools to equalize the resources spent on girls’ and boys’ athletics. Nationally, its effect was dramatic: the proportion of high school girls in sports went from 1 in 27 in 1972 to 1 in 4 in 1978, while the proportion of boys in sports held steady at 1 in 2.

But that national statistic masks great unevenness in enforcement between states. Because the law was structured around equalizing men’s and women’s opportunities, the amount of investment a school – or a state education department – needed to make in women’s sports depended on local levels of boys’ athletic participation. Which means that girls in some parts of the country were pushed into sports more aggressively than in others, in ways that had little to do with those girls’ interest in or aptitude for athletics. It was the equivalent of a randomized experiment, stripping out the selection effect to show what sports participation, on its own, could do for young people.


Title IX is associated with a 3% rise in women’s college attendance, and a 2 percentage point rise in the probability of getting a four-year degree.
Title IX is associated with a 2% increase in women’s employment.
Title IX is associated with a 1.5% increase in the numbers of women in male-dominated fields.
Title IX is associated with a 1.3% increase in women’s wages in states with high enforcement, though some of this may be the result of greater female employment.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mahaatal/2012/06/22/happy-40th-anniversary-title-ix-from-girls-sports-to-womens-wages/

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my son just came in and said we ought to celebrate feminism with root beer floats today. what? i say. title nine. 40th anniversy.

he is getting a root beer float today, lol.

tell about your experience. i have some stories but i have to get off the puter. will be back later to share.

[murielm99]

1. Title IX is not about sports.

Everyone identifies it with sports. It is a part of the Educational Amendment of 1972, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Originally, when women's rights were included in the Act, no one noticed, or they laughed.

It was used originally to help a woman fight for her job. She did not get a full professorship because she came on too strong "for a woman." She noticed that women at her school were being replaced by men. So, she fought for her job. Her name was Bernice Sandler. Her fight became a major cause for women's rights.

It is nice that women have more athletic opportunities. But we can all see what is happening right now, with the repug war on women. We can never rest.

[seabeyond]

2. my 14 yr old just explaned this to me, lol. i love smart, informed kids. even though

i had just read your post, i allowed him to go on and on, explain from his perspective and what he had read.

he told me that sports helped keep it though. (i will have to research, just telling his story) and that the cases that went to court to take it away, those judges had daughters and granddaughters in sports and that helped influence their decision. now, son listens to a lot of espn sports channel, so guessing that is where he got this. but they did attribute that it was not even about sports at the beginning.

thank you for your info. i am gonna expand on it a little later.