Women and self-image

Interesting meditation on women and body image in the Title IX era by one Hugo Schwyzer, who appears to be an academic and a fellow runner. If this isn't taking him too far out of context, he worries about two groups of women: those in sports in which light weight is a premium and those who feel pressured to be fit in an age where female fitness is prized. Both, he says, are prime candidates for developing body-image issues and eating disorders.

Bloggers discover Title IX

Having discovered Technorati, I've been able to note when Title IX pops up in the blogosphere. For a typical wrestler's point of view, check out Bassguy 101. And lefties (also here are starting to discover the Ed Department's March change, detailed farther down on my blog as well.

Interesting links

I'm starting to catch on to this whole blogging thing. (First, it's funny how self-referential most of it is; people linking back and forth and having debates with one another. Just mess around with Blogebrity for a bit.)
Anyway, thanks to Sour Duck, which I discovered via Technorati, I found a nice piece on Texas A&M's website. Over the past few years a number of colleges have had celebrations of women and women's history focusing on the passage of Title IX in 1972. Some, including Bowling Green State, have made a point of honoring women athletes from the pre-Title IX era and awarding them letters. Cool stuff.

We Must Protect Our Utes

Last week the University of Utah announced it was dropping men's track and cross-country teams to save money. Per the school, Title IX obligations were *not* a reason. Chris Hill, Utah's AD, had this to say:
"The timing of this decision may seem unusual since we are in compliance with gender equity, but after a careful review of our athletics program, we felt a change was needed for our overall well being."
Predictably, folks are still convinced that this is all about the law. But, as Chris points out in the news release, Utah really hasn't supported its men's track team for years. It's a shame, because Salt Lake is a great place to train if you're a distance runner, and given the success of BYU and the University of Colorado, Utah has the natural resources to have a killer track and cross-country program. But the school doesn't have a track, and Chris evidently sees it as too expensive to get the track program to where it would need to be to be competitive. So the move makes sense. Speaking as a runner, it sucks, but it makes sense.

This is brilliant.

Lights out

The usual tactic for Title IX bashers is to find the most absurd action a school or school board has taken and use it to declare that Title IX is a terrible law. A perfect example popped last month in Minnesota: A school board says it can't turn on the lights at the high school baseball diamond because there are no lights on the school's softball diamond.
Title IX requires schools to treat male and female students equitably in terms of facilities and scheduling, among many other things. Comparisons between baseball and softball diamonds pop up frequently, given that the sports are analogous by almost any standard. Across the country, high school booster clubs build primo baseball stadiums on school property, while softball players trek to junky city facilities. Is this equitable treatment?
In this particular case, the school board had in fact upgraded the softball facilities, but for some reason it chose not to add lights. Thus, it believed (and apparently the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights affirmed) that it couldn't use the lights at the baseball stadium.
The story says the school board didn't have enough money to put lights on the softball field (or fields, plural; it sounds like more than one school is involved). Yet surely spring softball faces the same scheduling challenges as baseball, particularly in a place where spring doesn't arrive until June. Seems more like a matter of poor planning than an unfair law.

Girl Power!

Fun story about an 11-year-old girl in upstate New York pitching a perfect game against boys. She even got her picture in the New York Times for it.
This at the same time folks are talking about the role of women in the military, particularly in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. I'm not going to comment on the latter, except to wonder why nobody's thought about whether women being ordered/coerced to humiliate detainees sexually constitutes sexual harassment. Given that, the military doesn't even do a good job of prosecuting rape charges against soldiers (according to the alternet story linked above and the drawn-out investigation at the U.S. Air Force Academy), sexual harassment must be down pretty far on the list.
But back to Katie Brownell, Girl Pitcher. Honestly, nobody should be surprised that an 11-year-old girl could be a pitcher (and hitter; she's got a .714 average) on par with the boys. At this age, girls are very strong relative to their weight, which is partially why so many Olympic gymnasts and swimmers are in their early teens.
And sports doesn't have to end with puberty. Here in Georgia, Portal High School's starting shortstop plays for both the softball team and the baseball team. That's just cool

Is College Sports a Business?

We had a little debate on this yesterday on KFNS The Fan in St. Louis. Assume for the moment that we're talking about Division I-A college sports.
Are big-time athletic departments run like a business? Absolutely. They're often required to make enough money to cover costs, and their annual budgets run in the tens of millions of dollars. (Whether they turn a profit is another story altogether.) They employ vast staffs of professionals in a variety of fields--administration, financial management, fundraising, marketing, PR, etc. Not to mention coaches.
But these athletics departments are still nonprofits. That is, they're organized as not-for-profit organizations because they are part of a university. Their mission is to provide an educational service for the athletes on their teams. College athletes are not paid, mind you--they receive scholarships because schools believe it's important to reward students for outstanding athletic ability.
So jocks, particularly those in the revenue sports, are an unpaid labor force, and the entire NCAA and its system of college sports is built about keeping them there. Paying athletes based on the services they provide would bankrupt all but the richest athletic programs, and even those would have to cut way back.
This is why we have this massive propaganda machine dedicated to convincing us that college athletes are amateur students competing for the love of the sport. Now I'm not saying that's not true, even for many football and basketball players. But legally speaking, they are unpaid workers, and the system depends on them.
What provoked this rant? Well, if colleges are going to abide by the legal fiction that athletic departments, then they must abide by Title IX and make sure that they have enough female athletes and that those athletes are treated equitably. That's why I get crazy when people suggest that football be taken out of the Title IX equation, or complain about how Title IX shouldn't apply to sports, and so forth. It should, it does, and most athletic departments support it strongly. It's just fans, wrestlers, libertarians, and a handful of Republicans who see it differently.

A nice plug from the home office...

A quick plug from this week's edition of The Chronicle Review:

Early in the 20th century, female coaches expressed an ideal: "A girl for every sport, and a sport for every girl." The triumph of Title IX shows how close we have come.

But "close" is not all the way. Women are a clear majority of students in higher education -- 7.5 million of the 13.2 million undergrads at American colleges. Women are underrepresented on sports teams, and most of their teams receive lower budgets, poorer facilities, and less attention than their male counterparts. Some argue that women are not as interested in sports as men and that the differences in participation reflect that. Regardless, women are still getting the short end of the stick when schools and colleges allocate resources.

Title IX has a yet darker side. In mandating that women athletes be treated the same as men, the law encouraged women's sports to develop in the hypercompetitive, highly commercialized model that evolved in men's sports over the past century and a half. Some teams ... play scores of games every year, cutting into schoolwork and other activities. In sports like cross-country and gymnastics, girls develop eating disorders after being encouraged to lose weight. Athletes specialize as early as their preteen years, so that only girls who have been competing in a sport since elementary school have a shot at making their high-school and college teams. ...

Athletic skill is becoming an important factor in college admissions, not just at sports powerhouses but also at small colleges. Americans see sports prowess as a proxy for other talents -- sportsmanship, fair play, leadership, teamwork, perseverance -- but the men's model of college sports does not always nurture those talents: The singular pursuit of winning rewards strength, speed, and skill, and not necessarily the more abstract goals of athletic participation.

-- Welch Suggs, senior editor for athletics at The Chronicle of Higher Education, in A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX, published by Princeton University Press