Title IX

As an intern at NWLC, I am struck by the fact that I didn’t know about Title IX before this experience, yet it could have affected my life. I hope that my story can help others become aware of this important law.

My 6th grade year was marred by bullying and harassment based on sex. Had my parents or I known about Title IX’s protection of students from sexual harassment, the outcome of this experience could have been drastically different.

Early that year, as I walked through a crowded hall, a boy squeezed my butt. He and his friends laughed at my horrified expression as they ran down the hall. I was 11 and felt confused and ashamed. My mom urged me to tell the principal, which I did. I didn’t know the boy, and though I tried to identify him with pictures, nothing ever happened.

At the school dance a few weeks later, his friends called me a “slut,” and “snitch” for telling on him. I cried in the bathroom and tried to pull my skirt down further on my legs. Read more »

On June 20th, NWLC participated in a National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education (NCWGE) event on Capitol Hill celebrating the anniversary of Title IX and the release of “Title IX at 40: Working to Ensure Gender Equity in Education,” a comprehensive report to help give educators, parents, students, and lawmakers a better understanding of Title IX’s impact and the equity challenges that remain in many areas of education.

Lisa Maatz of AAUW started off the event by acknowledging how Title IX has come so far but we still have lots of work to do, particularly in contexts outside of athletics: “Imagine if we could get women and girls interested in STEM the way we got them interested in sports.” Congresswoman Gwen Moore then gave us perspective what it was like before Title IX, when it was not illegal to deter pregnant and parenting women from completing school and women were given few or no scholarships and incentives to pursue a college education. Read more »

What could the 400 meter dash and the first year of law school possibly have in common? One is over in a minute; the other feels, at least while you’re in it, like it will never end. One is largely a physical pursuit, while the other requires internalizing vast amounts of knowledge. However, the lessons I learned through running have pulled me through law school, and for that, I thank Title IX.

Like a lot of other young women, I’ve been an athlete for the majority of my life. I started playing field hockey in elementary school (second graders running with wooden sticks—a good idea??). In high school, I joined the track team on a whim, and surprised myself when I turned out to be a fairly talented runner for my little town. I went on to have a successful track “career” through four years of high school and two years of college. In fact, one of the reasons I chose the college I did is that I wanted to run, but didn’t care to share a weight room with boys. (Silly? Maybe. But it seemed like a good justification at the time.) I credit track with keeping me focused at college and relatively out of trouble.

When I reflect on the lessons I’ve learned through sports, I can’t help but think that I wouldn’t have made it through my first year of law school alive without them—lessons like:

1. Your health is more important. I had a relay teammate in high school who reminded us of this during every pre-race huddle. She meant, winning is good, but preventing injuries is better. As I’ve moved through college, working life, and on to law school, I remind myself often that there are things bigger and more important than my on-paper success, including my own physical and mental well-being. Sometimes in law school you just have to take a nap, and that’s OK.

Saturday is Title IX’s 40th birthday – but we want to give it an extra-long birthday weekend, so we’re kicking off the celebrations today with a blog carnival!

Today we’re sharing stories about how Title IX has helped women and girls in the classroom and on the field for the past 40 years, as well as looking forward to the work that remains to fulfill the promise of this great law. From STEM and sports stories to the protections the law provides to students who are bullied, harassed, and pregnant or parenting, we’re honoring it all!

After the jump you’ll find blog posts from NWLC staff and our wonderful participants. Have a blog you’d like to submit to the blog carnival? Leave a link in the comments section on this post or email it to djackson@nwlc.org.

Read more »

40 years after Title IX was passed, schools still provide 1.3 million fewer chances for girls to play sports in high school. That means that girls do not receive equal opportunities to play, compete and reap the benefits that sports provide, both on and off the court.

Those benefits include important things like a decreased chance of developing heart disease, obesity, and other health-related problems. And female athletes are more likely to stay in school, be more self-confident and have better academic and employment outcomes. Girls who play sports also have lower rates of sexual activity and pregnancy and are less likely to smoke or use drugs.

And let’s not forget that girls who miss opportunities to play in high school will likely never play in college (and miss out on scholarships), professionally or even at the Olympics. Read more »

I began playing organized sports in fourth grade when my mom literally forced me to join a community soccer team. Soccer was big in my town. Especially girls’ soccer. There was a great club program, dozens of fields, and three talented high school teams. But I had little interest. More than that, I was scared. I’d grown up playing football, baseball, and basketball with my dad, brother, and cousins – but the idea of being on a real team, with other girls counting on me, and the outcome meaning more than who got the first slices of pie at Thanksgiving was pretty intimidating. What if I wasn’t any good? What if my teammates didn’t like me? What if the coach was mean? Did I really care that much about winning? It was one thing to play pick-up games with my family. It was another thing to be on a real team and compete against complete strangers – to be an athlete.

As it turns out, I had a lot of room for improvement on the soccer field, but my teammates were great (and I think they liked me), my coach very supportive, and I quickly learned that I DID really want to win. But more than that, I wanted to PLAY. I loved being out of the field, running down the sideline, yelling for my teammate to pass me the ball. And winning wasn’t so bad either. A spark, buried somewhere in my 9-year-old self, began to glow brighter. Read more »

	My grandmother and me

Many people associate Title IX primarily with women’s opportunities in athletics. They don’t realize that the same legislation which has empowered countless female athletes also requires that women and girls be given equal opportunities to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields free from discriminatory barriers.  To better understand the obstacles women in STEM encounter, I interviewed my grandmother, who was educated and trained as a biochemist.This is her story.

My now 85 year old grandmother from Costa Rica defied familial and societal expectations to pursue a career in biochemistry. She had the means to pursue a university education but her father did not support her ambitions. Women of her social class were supposed to get married after high school. So she ended up working in a lab to pay her own way through school.

My grandmother’s impressive work at the lab won her a scholarship to The Ohio State University and a rare and important opportunity to acquire training in Canada extracting and analyzing tree samples. However, the male research director of this project wanted to revoke my grandmother’s scholarship because of her sex. He justified canceling her scholarship, claiming he “did not want to risk her catching cold in the Canadian winter.” Read more »

About a month ago, I was sitting through other students’ final oral presentations in one of my last classes of the semester, a political science senior research seminar about representational inequality. My peers’ presentation topics were as fascinating as they were varied, with subjects ranging from socioeconomic stratification in Brazil to malapportionment in the U.S. Read more »

A group of us from the NWLC kicked off the Title IX 40th anniversary celebration early... We started whooping it up at 7:30 am on a recent Saturday morning when we took our places at the starting line of the Lawyers’ Have Heart 10K race in Washington. We continued the festivities by running 6.2 miles in the grueling D.C. heat.

In honor of the anniversary, we called our team The Title IXers.

The Title IXers before our run

NWLC’s Title IXers range in age from early 20s to early 40s. We are all beneficiaries of Title IX. It’s because of that law that we grew up in a time when girls’ and young women’s participation in elementary school, middle school, high school and college sports was a given.

Many of us were active in sports then and still are today. We ran, swam and played for the Panthers, the Knights, the Lions, the Bulldogs, the Blazers, the Gators and the Mutts. Through sports, we’ve formed friendships, learned life lessons, become leaders, stayed healthy and had a huge amount of fun. And most of the time, we think of this as nothing to write home about. Read more »

What do you get a law that has everything? Well, last week, just in time for Title IX’s 40th birthday (this Saturday, June 23), the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and Yale University decided to go the I-put-a-lot-of-time-into-this-present-because-I-really-care-about-you route: OCR and Yale entered into a resolution agreement to settle a complaint alleging that Yale failed to eliminate sex discrimination on campus in violation of Title IX. Happy birthday, Title IX!

The agreement resolves a March 2011 complaint by a group of 16 current and former Yale students alleging that a sexually hostile environment existed on campus. The complaint pointed to an October 2010 incident in which members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity chanted “No means yes! Yes means anal!” and other charming bon mots in front of the Yale Women’s Center.

This episode, the complaint claimed, was an example of an ongoing pattern of sexual harassment, to which the university failed to promptly or fairly respond. (No students involved received discipline.) In addition, the complaint alleged that Yale didn’t have a Title IX coordinator, as required by the law, and had an inadequate grievance process for addressing sex discrimination complaints. Read more »