Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics

Neena Chaudhry is Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics. Her work centers on litigation and advocacy to enforce and protect Title IX, primarily in the areas of athletics and sexual harassment. Prior to joining NWLC in 1997 as a Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow, Neena clerked for the Honorable Michael Daly Hawkins of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Maryland at College Park.

Expert in: Affirmative Action in Education, Affirmative Action in the Workplace, Athletics, Sexual Harassment & Bullying, Education & Title IX
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My Take

Quinnipiac University Finally Agrees to Settle Title IX Case

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: April 26, 2013 at 01:46 pm

After four years and five wins in the courts, the female volleyball players who sued Quinnipiac University for trying to eliminate their team and replace it with competitive cheerleading have secured a settlement that will help the entire women’s sports program. The settlement, announced today, requires Quinnipiac University to, among other things:

  • retain the volleyball team and all other women’s teams (the University added women’s golf and rugby recently and will help rugby evolve to the same competitive level as other sports);
  • increase scholarships for various women’s teams;
  • spend at least $5 million improving women’s athletic facilities, including locker rooms;
  • spend about $450,000 annually improving women’s coaching salaries, increasing coaches and academic support staff, and providing more athletic training services; and
  • allocate $175,000 during each of the next three years to a fund for additional improvements for women’s sports.

This case was very important in terms of setting precedent and providing guidance to schools across the country on several issues. First, there was a lot of fuzzy math that the court said was inappropriate. For example, the school double- and triple-counted students who were listed as members of the women’s cross-country, indoor track, and outdoor track teams, even though many of the women did not receive genuine participation opportunities on more than one of the teams. The law allows multi-sport athletes to be counted for each sport they play, but only if they are really playing.

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Court Finds that Quinnipiac University Is Still Not In Compliance with Title IX

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: March 06, 2013 at 11:10 am

The District Court that first told Quinnipiac University it violated Title IX when it dropped the women’s volleyball team and claimed its cheer squad counted as a sport has once again told the university that it is not in compliance with the law. In an almost 100-page opinion issued yesterday, the Court instructed QU to continue to sponsor volleyball and said that QU needs to make more progress before the Court will let it out from under its watch. Maybe this time the University will finally get the message.

The latest decision comes after QU asked the court to lift the order instructing it to keep volleyball and devise a plan to provide equal opportunities for female students. QU claims that it has added golf and rugby for women and made changes to cheer that should make it count under Title IX; so they once again want to drop the volleyball team (they seem to have a volleyball vendetta).

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Tags: Athletics, Title IX, Athletics, Education & Title IX | 1 comment

The Department of Education’s Collection of Gender Equity in Athletics Data Is Critical

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: March 05, 2013 at 06:14 pm

The title of this post is the message we conveyed to the Department of Education in response to their request for public input regarding the collection of Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) data. If you’re not familiar with the EADA, check out our one-pager here that explains what the law requires of colleges and universities (for example, the numbers of men and women playing sports and expenses allocated to each team). The Department helpfully puts all of this info on a website where anyone can look up any institution and print out a few pages with all the information that schools are required to disclose.

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Tags: Athletics, Department of Education, Title IX | 1 comment

Girls’ Basketball Team in Indiana School District Finally Will Get Equal Treatment

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: October 16, 2012 at 03:07 pm

After refusing to voluntarily do the right thing for well over a decade, Franklin County High School has finally filed an agreement in court (PDF) to schedule its girls’ basketball team equally in primetime slots (Friday and Saturday games). Unfortunately, it took a Title IX lawsuit to convince the school that scheduling almost all of the boys’ games on weekends and only about half of the girls’ games on weekends was unfair. Nevermind that the United States Department of Education sent a letter to Indiana high schools expressing concern over their scheduling practice of reserving primetime slots for boys’ games – in 1997!

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Second Circuit Says Quinnipiac University Cannot Count Cheer as a Sport Under Title IX

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: August 09, 2012 at 04:38 pm

The Second Circuit has confirmed that Quinnipiac University ran afoul of Title IX when it dropped the women’s volleyball team and tried to count the competitive cheerleading team as a sport under Title IX. That doesn’t mean cheer isn’t a great activity or that it’s not athletic; it simply means that cheer is not developed enough at this point to qualify as a varsity sport under U.S. Department of Education guidelines. The court held that cheer did not qualify as a varsity sport because it did not walk and talk like other varsity sports. The cheer team did not conduct any off-campus recruiting, did not compete solely against other varsity teams, and had no progressive playoff system in the post season.

The other big issue the court addressed involves the standards for complying with prong one of Title IX’s three-part participation test. Following Department of Education policy, the court held that QU’s 3.62% gap between female enrollment and participation—which amounted to 38 additional spots needed to provide women with proportional opportunities—was large enough to field an additional women’s team and therefore did not constitute compliance.

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