WSF Response to Katie Thomas New York Times Article, "College Teams, Relying on Deception, Undermine Gender Equity"

The Women’s Sports Foundation congratulates Katie Thomas for her hard work and in-depth analysis reflected in the New York Times article, "College Teams, Relying on Deception, Undermine Gender Equity." The article exposes the fact that some schools purposefully undermine gender equity laws by engineering athletic opportunities for women that are incomparable to the opportunities provided to men.

The fact that some colleges and universities engage in nefarious practices to circumvent anti-discrimination laws such as Title IX, and their public reporting requirements, emphasizes the ongoing importance of the laws themselves. Kathryn Olson, CEO of the WSF, said, “If an athletic department is willing to manipulate its sports programs by creating an artificial veneer of fairness among its male and female students with these laws on the books, one must wonder what would happen without Title IX.”

The WSF’s Senior Director of Advocacy, Nancy Hogshead-Makar, points out, “Athletics is the only formally sex-segregated department in education. As such, it sends important messages to the entire institution about how it will treat men and women. As the article makes clear, the institutions are fooling no one. This type of visible fabrication sends the wrong message to all students and calls into question an institution’s commitment to fairness in all its programs.”

The article did not consider one effect of double/ triple counting: Athletic scholarships for women. A low scholarship allotment/ high roster count will prevent a university from being able to provide the total amount of scholarship funds available to men and women on a "substantially proportionate" basis. The University of South Florida’s athletics department, with its 127 duplicated women athletes but just 13 men duplicates, cannot comply with the equal scholarship mandate of Title IX, because only one scholarship can be given to the athlete counted three times. This means that women student-athletes at USF miss out on almost $800,000 in scholarship dollars per year.

According to the article, the University of South Florida started its fraudulent counting games with women’s sports when it added men’s football in 1997. According to the Knight Commission, only 14 universities do not shift money from academics to athletics. Intercollegiate athletics enjoy abundant tax advantages because of its educational mission, its investment in the future economic productivity of its citizenry. As long as intercollegiate athletics is generously supported with our tax dollars, these scarce educational opportunities should be allocated fairly and equitably between our children.

www.WomensSportsFoundation.org

Women's Sports Foundation
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This release was published on openPR.