Head coach of the women's lacrosse team Chris Sailer has seen many changes in the world of women's sports.
A 1981 Harvard University graduate, Sailer applied to colleges in the wake of the groundbreaking Title IX ruling.
Passed in 1972 as part of the Educational Amendments Act, Title IX states that "no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of or be subject to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."
Though it affects all aspects of education, through the years Title IX has primarily influenced athletics programs.
By the time Sailer arrived at Harvard in fall 1977, Title IX had been on the books for five years. Sailer, however, did not sense any concerted effort to enforce the new law.
"In those times, in the '70s, Title IX had been passed but I never felt that they were working very hard to comply with it," she said.
Long-held athletic traditions prevented the immediate enactment of the legislation. Ineffectiveness also resulted from ambiguity about the law itself.
In part to combat confusion raised by Title IX and in part to provide a means to determine compliance with the law, the Office of Civil Rights established in 1978 three specific criteria which would demonstrate that a school was providing equal opportunity to all its students.
The office stipulated that every institution demonstrate "substantial participation proportionality," continuous expansion of opportunities for the "underrepresented sex" and that the "interests and abilities of the members of that [underrepresented] sex have been fully and effectively accommodated by the present program."
Proportionality — meaning that the ratio of female to male athletes equals that of female to male students — has emerged as the litmus test for whether a school is complying with Title IX.
However, even 30 years after the establishment of Title IX, a high percentage of schools are not in compliance with the law according to this standard, the Department of Education said on its website.
At Princeton, where the student body is evenly split between men and women, women still make up only about 40 percent of all student athletes.
In the absence of proportionality, a school must demonstrate that opportunities for the "underrepresented sex" are continually expanding.
Though the University cannot be considered proportionally representative, the University has added four new women's sports since 1988 — a trend reflected nationwide.
Expanding opportunity can also be measured by the number of athletic scholarships offered to women.
Before Title IX, no athletic scholarships were awarded to female athletes, according to the Department of Education. The University of Miami awarded the first athletic scholarships to women in 1973, and a year later 50 scholarships were given to female athletes — as compared with the 50,000 given to men.
As the number of scholarships available to female athletes has increased, the intensity and character of the recruiting process has also changed.
When Sailer was deciding what college to attend five years after Title IX, athletic scholarships for women were scarce.
"I was recruited, but certainly the recruiting process was a lot different than it is now," Sailer said. "There really wasn't scholarship money, there weren't the recruiting tournaments that there are now. A lot of the responsibility was on our part to contact the schools that we were interested in.
"Now, we spend most of our time recruiting. Compared to even 10 years ago, there's absolutely no comparison."
Softball coach Maureen Davies Barron '97 said she saw an equity between men's and women's teams when she was at Princeton.
"I felt that I was reaping the benefits of Title IX," Davies said.
While not many people would deny that Title IX has positively changed the face of women's sports, its effect on men's sports is a much more controversial subject.
As a means of satisfying the proportionality requirement of Title IX, many schools have simply cut back on their men's programs rather than trim other parts of the budget to create funds for new women's teams. Many accomplished programs have been dropped, prompting alumni outrage. Such programs include baseball at Providence College and men's swimming at University of California, Los Angeles. Boston University made headlines when it dropped its football team in 1997.
One sport hit hard by cutbacks in men's athletics is wrestling. With no female counterpart and lacking the strong fan support of most university football programs, more than 400 wrestling programs have been axed in the past 20 years. Princeton also fell prey to similar budget-cutting, dropping its wrestling team in 1993 — though the University was able to reinstate it with heavy private funding in 1996.
The elimination of men's sports teams has prompted some to question Title IX and proclaim it does exactly what it set out to prohibit — allocate opportunities based solely on sex.
Critics of Title IX proclaim that the law is creating opportunities for those who do not want or need them while stripping opportunities from those who do.
"Men have been penalized over the past 20 years for having a higher interest than women in athletics," J. Robinson, men's wrestling coach at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "We should provide opportunities for whoever wants to play sports, but not manufacture those opportunities for those who show no interest."
Proponents of the law, such as Sailer, disagree with Robinson, noting that women have taken advantage of athletic opportunities as they have arisen.
"I don't understand how you can measure interest when there's no opportunity," Sailer said. "Since Title IX, the number of girls playing in both high school and college has increased tremendously, and that's only happened because the opportunities are there."
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