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

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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Tags: Athletics, Courts & the Judiciary, Title IX, Athletics, Education & Title IX | 1 comment

Keep Calm and Kick Butt!

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: August 08, 2012 at 02:31 pm

Keep Calm and Kick ButtWow! Team U.S.A.'s athletes are amazing.

Did you see Alex Morgan's stunning game-winning goal in overtime? Or Gabby Douglas and the Fab Five making history? And who could forget Katie Ledecky — at only 15 years old — breaking the U.S. record and winning a gold medal in the 800 freestyle.

We are so proud of all of our athletes. London 2012 is the first time that the majority of Team U.S.A. is female, and there is no doubt that thanks is owed to four decades of Title IX. In the 1972 Summer Games, the same year Title IX was born, 21% of the American competitors were women. Forty years later the American delegation is a whopping 51% female.

The Olympic games are far from over. Show your support for what's been called the "Title IX Olympics." You can:

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

Some Good Sports News from Pennsylvania: State Passes Law Requiring Schools to Disclose Athletics Information

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: July 18, 2012 at 05:17 pm

Pennsylvania recently joined a handful of other states that require schools to publicly disclose gender equity in sports data every year, which will help communities learn more about how their schools are treating girls and boys in athletics. The Equity in Interscholastic Athletics Disclosure Bill requires Pennsylvania middle and high schools to disclose the numbers of athletic opportunities provided to boys and girls, broken down by race/ethnicity, as well as team expenditures, coaches’ salaries, and other gender equity information. The first reports are due November 2013 and will be available on schools’ websites as well as the state Department of Education’s website.  The law is similar to ones on the books in Georgia and New Mexico.

Schools already collect or have this information but are not required to disclose it publicly, which puts the burden on individuals wanting to know more about a school’s sports program to file an open records request and navigate that process. Data bills like the one enacted by Pennsylvania make it easier for parents and students to access critical information to evaluate whether girls are boys are being treated fairly in their school sports programs (see recent article highlighted by our colleagues at the Women’s Law Project, who were instrumental in getting the bill passed).  At the college level, the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act has been in place since 1994 and has helped identify many problems at colleges and universities across the country. Efforts have been underway for many years to pass a similar federal law that would apply to all secondary schools.

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Tags: Athletics, Pennsylvania, Title IX, Athletics, Education & Title IX | Add new comment

Title IX Survives, Again

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: March 30, 2012 at 09:43 am

Earlier this week, the federal district court for the District of Columbia dismissed a case brought by the American Sports Council against the U.S. Department of Education, in which ASC tried to stop the Department from applying to high schools Title IX’s three-part test for determining whether schools are providing males and females with equal opportunities to play sports. Of course, the law has always applied to high schools; this was merely the latest attempt to weaken Title IX’s application to sports.

You would think that everyone would be in favor of treating our sons and daughters equally, but ASC and similar groups have long argued that the law hurts males by requiring schools to cut their opportunities in order to provide girls and women with opportunities that they don’t really want, because they are inherently less interested in playing sports. Fortunately, the federal courts of appeals have unanimously rejected such arguments, which are premised on the very stereotypes that Title IX was enacted to combat.

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Tags: Athletics, Department of Education, Education and Schools, Title IX, Athletics, Education & Title IX | 2 comments

Tell Congress: Make Sure Girls Get a Fair Chance in Sports

Posted by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel and Director of Equal Opportunities in Athletics | Posted on: January 24, 2012 at 05:06 pm

As the old adage goes, you can't solve a problem unless you're able to define it.

We know that girls who play sports reap benefits both on and off the field. But we also know that girls across the country are still not getting equal opportunities to play sports or equal treatment when they do play. To make matters worse, when parents and students try to find out how their schools are allocating valuable athletic opportunities and resources, they are not able to get information.

High schools, like colleges, should be required to make information about their sports programs publicly available. Please ask your Members of Congress to support the High School Athletics Accountability Act, H.R. 458, and the High School Data Transparency Act, S. 1269. These two bills would require high schools to report information, broken down by gender, on sports participation and expenditures. Schools are already collecting this information, but since it is not public, parents and students cannot evaluate their athletics programs to make sure that girls are being treated fairly.

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Tags: Athletics, Take Action, Athletics, Education & Title IX | Add new comment