Having grown up in the United States, there are some things that you just take for granted. Driving on the right side of the road, being universally hated by human rights activists and hitting “shift 2” to produce the @ symbol on a keyboard are among the more banal normalities of everyday life back home that you just miss when live across the pond.
One thing, that I also miss, is Title IX.
Trying to explain the legal ins and outs of Title IX is about as easy as trying to get Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ (unabridged) tattooed onto your body.
A subsection of the United States Education Amendment Act of 1972, Title IX--among other things--stated,
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
Controversial from day one, it would be years before Congress would draft and pass all of the clarifications and addendums that have since become the backbone for the sports programs of educational institutions from Kindergarten through NCAA Div. I championship games. It was in 1979 that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, imposed a three part assessment to assess the compliance of various educational institutions with Title IX. Asking all institutions that received Federal Funding of any kind for educational programs to ask the following questions about their sports funding, aid, programming and assistance;
- "All such assistance should be available on a substantially proportional basis to the number of male and female participants in the institution's athletic program."
- "Male and female athletes should receive equivalent treatment, benefits, and opportunities" regarding facilities.
- "The athletic interests and abilities of male and female students must be equally effectively accommodated.
Within a decade Title IX and it’s internal standards meant that US schools, from Kindergarten to college, were suddenly required to provide for equal numbers of male and female athletes, and spend more or less the same amount of money on athletic programs for each gender. Gone were the days of women’s teams scraping together pennies from dues while their male counterparts were fully funded by Universities.
Title IX is perhaps one of the most impactful pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States. It so shifted the way that US schools and educational institutions ran their athletics and sports programs that it changed the way people engaged in sports throughout their entire lives. Title IX spawned a generation that revolutionized the access women had to sport, and then to high level international sport. It has become such a stalwart of the American landscape that I imagine many Americans would find themselves in the same position I have; not even noticing the full breadth of Title IX’s ongoing impact, until suddenly it’s gone.
Welcome to the United Kingdom, circa 2015. I, a pretty typical west-coast US inhabitant, have played some form of sport for most of my life. Soccer (aka football), softball, Tae Kwon Do, in college I rowed for my university. I grew up with afternoon practices and coaches that promised it wasn’t about winning or losing but only bought you ice cream if you won. and pointedly did not if you lost. Born in the mid 1980’s I had no concept of Title IX. My brothers, sisters and I all got dropped off for practice in the afternoon, and were all forced to sit through each other’s games, and drive across the state for championships.
I cared about being assigned as the second base in softball. Not about whether my family could afford my team fees.
When I rowed at a university I never would have imagined that the men’s team would have access to races and facilities that we didn’t. We were a team, they rowed in their divisions, we rowed in ours….but at the end of the day we all rowed in the same caliber of races that cost the University the same amount of money. Women didn’t inherit the men’s old boats. New gear was equally distributed. Because in US athletics, there is legally no other way.
In short, I lived in an environment that, while not perfect, provided me the same access to athletics and outdoor education that my brothers had. The question was not, “where can we find a club for the girls to play in” it was instead “how long is your practice again?” A question whose groundbreaking potential I never realized until I moved to the United Kingdom and learned that access and equality are slippier concepts than they ought to be, and that “development” is not synonymous with “equality.”
Moving to Cambridge to begin graduate work in the fall of 2013 I was floored to find that many of the British women I was getting to know had not participated in sports before secondary school, and in many cases before university. Or if they had, their parents had enrolled them in private clubs and paid out the nose to provide them with those opportunities. I learned that it was semi-common for primary schools to fund a boys soccer (football) club, and not a girls club, and that this was perfectly legal.
As I’ve gotten into the habit, one of the first things I did at the University of Cambridge, was start looking around for sports I could get involved in, teams I could try out for or join, and as I’ve spent an ungodly number of hours sitting in a boat, rowing caught my fancy pretty fast.
I could not have found a better example of sexism in sport at Cambridge if I’d tried. While I will never row at the University Level, I was floored to learn that it wasn’t until 2010 that the women’s blues team was not given access to the University Boat House. And even then, it was only at the insistence of the team sponsors....a US investment firm. At the college level women are consistently fighting for the right to participate in rowing to the same level as men. For the termly “Bumps” races there are always extra divisions for male rowers. Anecdotally, I know a half a dozen female rowers whose teams get “new boats” when they inherit the used boats that the mens teams give up when their *actually new* boat comes in every few years. There are more “Blues” sports for men at the University Level and as a general rule, finding sponsorship for sports at the All Women’s colleges of Newnham, Murray Edwards and Lucy Cavendish, seems all but impossible.
I have to admit, it’s not that there aren’t amazing opportunities for women in sport in the UK, and it’s not as though women here don’t play sport. It’s simply that something seemingly normal, I now see as the luxury of growing up in an environment where equality in access was something everyone strove for---whether they liked it or not.
Britain has some astounding female athletes, and I am very much looking forward to each of the Varsity Matches between the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford as the “blues battle it out,” but I do think that maybe it’s time that these ancient universities take the lead, and re-assess what access to sport means. After all, a generation ago, Mia Hamm would have struggled to find a football (soccer) team to take her on, and today she is the top-scoring player of all time.
In the meantime, anytime anyone mentions University Sport, I’ll be quietly sitting in the corner. Sobbing into my copy of Title IX.
