Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX

When it passed Title IX of the Civil Rights Act in 1972, Congress seemed to be doing something laudable and also long overdue - prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in America's schools. But thirty years later, a law designed to guarantee equal opportunity has become the most explicit, government-enforced quota regime in America. "Tilting the Playing Field" is a trenchant insider's look at how one law - and its unintended consequences - has affected our view of sports, sex, and schools.

In the tradition of Who Stole Feminism? and Christina Hoff Sommers, Jessica Gavora offers a devastating account of feminism gone haywire. For more than a generation, liberal women's groups have used a piece of federal civil rights legislation called Title IX to expand opportunities for women to play sports in college. In a classic case of unintended consequences, however, they've wrought enormous damage on men's sports programs. The cost of complying with Title IX has led to the abolition of hundreds of men's sports programs, including some heralded ones. In 1993, for instance, UCLA dropped its men's swimming and diving teams, which had produced 16 Olympic gold medalists. This is all done in the name of sexual "proportionality"--the supposed iniquity of men playing sports more than women. Gavora is a good writer and a perceptive critic who notes an exquisite irony: "Whereas in every other area of life, from the military to the boardroom to the bedroom, women's rights activists have insisted that women be allowed to compete in the same arena with men, Title IX activists have worked in athletics to protect women's special status.... On this narrow score, difference is accepted." Gavora also points out that Title IX radicalism won't halt at the edge of the sporting field; it's now stepping into new areas, including school harassment policies, student testing, and math and science achievement--anywhere males and females don't conform to feminist expectations of gender equity. Tilting the Playing Field is an excellent book on an important subject, and will appeal to right-leaning readers who dissent from feminist orthodoxy. --John Miller