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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.

My Take

ESPN Launches Title IX Series and Reminds Us that We Still Have a Long Way to Go

Yesterday ESPN aired the first of nine films celebrating Title IX in its “Nine for IX” series. The first one, “Venus Vs.,” is about Venus Williams’ fight for equal pay for women at Wimbledon. While it is a triumphant story in many ways, I couldn’t help but be struck (and frustrated), as I always am, at the slow pace of progress.

The fight for equal pay at Wimbledon, much like the fight for equal pay for women in general, has been going on for decades. In tennis, Billie Jean King started the effort that Venus helped bring to fruition.

Similarly, on the playing fields of our nation’s schools, the battle for gender equity rages on. Over forty years after Title IX was passed, girls are still not receiving equal chances to play or equal benefits when they do.

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Quinnipiac University Finally Agrees to Settle Title IX Case

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

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

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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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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