Illinois reaches settlements with Tim Beckman, former women's basketball players

By Shannon Ryan, Chicago Tribune

Illinois has reached financial settlements totaling $625,000 with former football coach Tim Beckman and seven former women's basketball players, the university said in separate news releases Tuesday.

Read the story here.

Top U.S. Women Soccer Players Join the Fight for Equal Pay

Cole Schotz PC, Lexology

On Wednesday, March 30, five players for the U.S. women’s soccer team officially joined the national fight for equal pay by submitting a wage discrimination complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”).

Read the story here.

Related story:

• U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team alleges gender wage discrimination (Ford & Harrison LLP)
• High Profile Pay Equity “Champions”: U.S. Women’s Soccer Players File EEOC Wage Discrimination Charge (Seyfarth Shaw LLP)
• U.S. women soccer champs demand equal wages, conditions (Reuters)
• Top Female Players Accuse U.S. Soccer of Wage Discrimination (The New York Times)
• U.S. women soccer players charge pay discrimination (CNN)

Settlement Reached on Title IX Athletics Probe at Buffalo’s Erie Community College

U.S. Department of Education

The U.S. Department of Education announced today that its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has reached a settlement with Erie Community College in Buffalo, New York, to resolve issues of women’s access to athletic opportunities at the institution.

Read the press release here.

N.F.L. Will Require Women to Be Interviewed for Executive Positions

By Ken Belson, The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — In an effort to diversify leadership in the upper ranks of the N.F.L., Commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday that the league would now require that at least one woman be interviewed for any executive position openings in the league office.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• An Ex-Prosecutor Is Unafraid to Flag the Players (The New York Times)

Florida State to Pay $950,000 to Settle Title IX Suit by Quarterback’s Accuser

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Florida State University will pay $950,000 to settle a federal Title IX lawsuit filed by a former student who said she had been raped by a star quarterback for the Seminoles, USA Today reports. The university also agreed to make a five-year commitment to prevention and training programs.

Read the story here.

Title IX Exclusion and Marginalization Needs to Change

By Jacqueline McDowell, Diverse Issues in Higher Education

When Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act was passed in 1972 it stated, in part, “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” More than 40 years later, we have a law that was meant to protect many, but is too focused on a few — those participating in varsity-level collegiate sports.

Read the story here.

Study: Diversity Declines in Athletic Hiring Again

Inside Higher Ed

The leaders of the top college athletic programs and conferences this year are more white and more male than in 2014, according to a new study released by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Report: Leadership Atop FBS Schools Still Mostly White, Male (Diverse Issues in Higher Education)
• College Athletic Departments Dropping Ball on LGBT Inclusion (Diverse Issues in Higher Education)

At Two-Year Colleges, Less Scrutiny Equals Less Athletic Equality

The New York Times
By KATIE THOMAS
Published: July 16, 2011

Los Angeles Southwest College has a new athletic field house and football stadium, but almost no female athletes. Women make up more than two-thirds of students at this community college in the city’s South Central neighborhood, but less than a quarter of its athletes. The college’s decision to suspend the track team this year left women who wanted to play a sport with a single option: basketball.
Henry Washington, the college’s athletic director and head football coach, acknowledges that his program is most likely violating federal law by failing to offer enough roster spots to women.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/sports/at-two-year-colleges-less-scrutiny-equals-less-athletic-equality.html?_r=1&hp

Quinnipiac's female athletes granted class action status

CTPost.com
Michael P. Mayko, Staff Writer
Published: 10:53 p.m., Monday, May 24, 2010

BRIDGEPORT -- The discrimination case brought against Quinnipiac University by female athletes got bigger Monday.
U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill made it a class action case ruling that "all present, prospective and future female students at Quinnipiac University who have been harmed by and want to end" sex discrimination in the allocation of athletic opportunities, financial assistance or benefits provided to varsity athletes may seek to join the case.
Underhill will try the case, without a jury, on June 21.

Full Story: http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Quinnipiac-s-female-athletes-granted-class-action-498423.php

Slippery Rock University agrees to additional Title IX improvements

Post-Gazette.com
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Slippery Rock University must improve the women's softball field and provide additional funding for female athletics as part of a settlement filed yesterday in a Title IX lawsuit.
The original complaint, brought by 12 female student-athletes in 2006, was filed after Slippery Rock cut its women's swimming and water polo teams.
The case was settled in April 2007. However, in June, the plaintiffs filed a motion in federal court to reopen the case, alleging that the university had failed to follow through with the requirements of the settlement.
Among the complaints, the women athletes said that the university had failed to make the agreed-upon improvements to the softball field and failed to provide equitable coaching for women's track.Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09356/1022710-298.stm#ixzz0aVdDyPHd

Title IX Trojan Horse?

Inside Higher Ed
November 3, 2009

A federal investigation into possible bias against female applicants would, one might expect, be welcome news to groups that advocate for the education of women. After all, these groups have over the years urged tougher federal enforcement of anti-bias laws.
But factor in the politics of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars gender bias in educational institutions receiving federal funds, and things have a way of getting complicated. Namely, a new federal probe into the allegations that liberal arts colleges are unfairly favoring male applicants is seen by many Title IX experts as a sneak attack on an important law. They believe that in the name of gender equity, the commission is in fact trying to undercut gender equity.
At issue is a move by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to investigate liberal arts college admissions. The inquiry was begun based on reports that many private liberal arts colleges -- struggling to have anything close to parity between male and female students -- favor male applicants. Private undergraduate colleges generally are considered to have the legal right to do so, given an exemption in Title IX for their admissions policies. But much of the probe is directed toward the issue of athletics, with commissioners favoring the inquiry saying that it would be "preferable" for liberal arts colleges to add male athletic teams to attract more male students than it is to use admissions preferences, as is alleged to be taking place now.
The inquiry was planned without much consultation with advocates for women's athletes, and many of them -- just learning of what's going on -- are concerned.
The civil rights commission's investigation "seeks to allow schools to discriminate against women in order to attract more male students. Not only is this unlawful, it would be patently unfair," said Leslie Brueckner, a lawyer with Public Justice, a legal organization that has brought numerous suits on behalf of women's athletics. "Women should not be made to pay the price for the fact that fewer men are interested in seeking higher education. Surely, there are other ways to attract males to schools than to reinstate sex discrimination against women in sports."
Brueckner noted that the Civil Rights Commission's own analysis in deciding to kick off the investigation cited a variety of reasons that men these days lag in college enrollments: They are more likely than women to enlist in the military, to seek jobs in the building trades or to end up in jail. Given these large societal issues, she asked, why should a federal agency be assuming that the key problem with male enrollments is insufficient chances to be an athlete, and that this justified a shift in Title IX. If colleges are favoring male applicants, she said, the solution isn't to let them ignore the rights of female students who are athletes.
"The goal of this approach, as I understand it, would be to stop schools from discriminating in admissions by permitting them to discriminate in athletics," Brueckner said. "To this, I have only one response: Two wrongs do not make a right."

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/03/titleix

Fund Raiser Sues SUNY-Binghamton, Saying She Was Used as Sexual 'Plaything'

The Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog
July 9, 2009

Elizabeth Williams, a fund raiser for the State University of New York at Binghamton, has sued the institution, asserting that senior officials in the athletics department tried to use her as a sexual “plaything,” in part to elicit contributions from prospective donors, the Associated Press reported this afternoon.
In March, Ms. Williams filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in which she alleged “egregious acts of sexual misconduct” by two senior athletics-department officials. In the complaint, she said she had been subjected to sexual harassment by the officials after she began working in the department, in January.
In one instance, Ms. Williams said she had been told to dress provocatively for a fund-raising dinner in New York City, where she said she was offered money from a donor in exchange for sex. The two athletics officials, who accompanied her to the dinner, “encouraged and participated” in the harassment for the remainder of the night, according to her complaint.

Full Post: http://chronicle.com/news/article/6764/fund-raiser-sues-suny-binghamton-saying-she-was-used-as-sexual-plaything?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Racial and Gender Diversity in College Sports Is 'Worst' in Many Years, Report Says

Chronicle of Higher Education
February 19, 2009

White people still dominate key leadership positions in college athletics, and opportunities for coaches of color in sports other than basketball remain poor, according to a new report on race and gender in college sports.
Even in the NCAA’s Division I men’s basketball, the percentage of head-coach positions held by African-Americans has dropped. In 2008, 23 percent of head coaches were African-American, the report says, down two percentage points from the all-time high of 25 percent, in 2006.
“The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card: College Sport,” as it is called, was released this morning by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. The organization, based at the University of Central Florida, releases similar reports on the NBA, the WNBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball, and Major League Soccer.
In all, the report gave college sports a grade of C-plus for hiring in race and gender.

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/news/article/6002/race-and-gender-in-college-sports-is-worst-in-many-years?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Backers of Title IX Hope Obama Will End 'Stalemate' Over Enforcement

Chronicle of Higher Education
February 17, 2009
By LIBBY SANDER

Supporters of Title IX say they hope that President Obama will step up enforcement of the federal gender-equity law and help college athletics departments comply with its requirements during a time of fiscal hardship.
Although the new president has not spoken substantively about Title IX since taking office last month, he gave signals on the campaign trail as to how he will approach the issue. Those comments were a welcome change of pace among gender-equity advocates, who say enforcement was in a holding pattern during the Bush administration.
Last year Mr. Obama singled out the federal agency responsible for enforcing Title IX, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, as ineffective in its efforts to police institutions under the law.
"Compliance reviews have dropped, the focus of the reviews has narrowed, and the agency has taken a lax approach to enforcement," Mr. Obama told USA Today.
He said he would devote more resources to the agency and, in the realm of athletics, called on high schools and colleges to be more "proactive" in complying with the law, which is part of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Advocates say they are eager to see an end to a "stalemate" on the issue under President George W. Bush, when Title IX enforcement slowed and the tenor of the political debate about the law grew ever more strained.
From 2002 to 2006, the Office for Civil Rights conducted just one compliance review, according to a study by the National Women's Law Center, an advocacy group. The office investigated 105 complaints alleging sex discrimination in college athletics, but "the impression remained that it should have taken a more proactive approach to enforcing Title IX," says Daniel A. Cohen, a lawyer in Atlanta who represents colleges and universities in Title IX cases.
Mr. Cohen says the Obama administration is also likely to revise, if not do away with, a 2005 "clarification" of Title IX that allows institutions to use an interest survey to show that they are in compliance. The measure failed to gain traction on campuses and never received the endorsement of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. But it was nonetheless viewed as a setback by gender-equity advocates, who felt that it weakened the intent of the law.
After that, the Bush administration was largely quiet on the issue — not making any more regulatory changes, but not offering any guidance, either.
And while advocates' hopes for Mr. Obama are speculative at best, whatever comes next, says Christine Grant, a longtime supporter of Title IX, "will be better than the last eight years, because I don't think it can be worse."
A New Chapter
For some longtime gender-equity advocates, the ebb and flow of political tides with each new administration has become a familiar if not always comforting cycle. This time, in part because the new president has two young daughters and speaks often — and fondly — of the role of sports in his own life, the feeling is positively chipper.
"I have been listening carefully to what President Obama has been saying, and he has been saying all the right things," Ms. Grant says. "This president gets it."
The enthusiasm is predictable, says Jeffrey H. Orleans, departing executive director of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents. "People who care about Title IX always feel more positive when there's a Democratic administration," says the former civil-rights lawyer, who was a principal author of the regulations for carrying out the landmark legislation.
Title IX bans sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds. Although it applies to many programs, it is best known for swelling the ranks of the nation's highschool and college sports teams with women.
The most widely used method of showing compliance with the law is to have the percentage of women playing sports be proportionate to a college's overall female student population. This method, known as proportionality, has been challenged by groups that advocate for men's sports, who argue that it forces colleges to fulfill "quota" requirements and cut men's teams in order to do so. Full Story: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i24/24a02001.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Backsliding for Women’s Sports

Inside Higher Ed
October 31, 2008

Most of the major changes in the status of women’s intercollegiate sports came a decade or two ago when, through a combination of tough federal enforcement, court challenges, and enlightened decisions by college leaders, many institutions began to lavish more money and attention in an attempt to give equitable treatment to their women’s teams and female athletes.
Over the last five years or so — even as advocates for lower-profile men’s sports have continued to spar with women’s sports advocates about numbers and politics — the status quo has largely held, with the proportion of college athletes who are women staying relatively flat.
Now, though, it appears as if women are beginning to lose ground. A biennial gender equity report released without fanfare by the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Thursday finds that colleges that play Division I sports directed a smaller proportion of athletics spending to women’s teams in 2005-6 than they did in 2003-4. In the 2003-4 academic year, when the NCAA last surveyed its members, Division I sports programs spent an average of $7,285,500 on men’s sports and $4,194,800 on women’s sports, for a 16 percentage point differential (63 to 37 percent). In 2005-6, the year examined in the survey released Thursday, that split had widened to 22 percentage points, 66 percent to 34 percent ($8,653,600 for men’s sports vs. $4,447,900 for women’s teams). [Full story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/31/women]

New Study: Men’s Football, Basketball Programs Limit Other Men’s Sports, Not Title IX

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Lois Elfman
Sep 26, 2008, 12:40

Another men’s college wrestling program is discontinued and familiar accusations fly: it’s the fault of Title IX and money being spent on women’s sports. Time and again critics point to Title IX as the reason for cuts in men’s sports.

“We really believe that the Title IX blame game should end,” said Dr. Marj Snyder, chief planning and programming officer for the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF). On Sept. 24, in honor of the 35th anniversary of Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in “The Battle of the Sexes,” the WSF released the detailed study “Who’s Playing College Sports? Money, Race and Gender.”

Dr. John Cheslock, the report’s author and an associate professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, repeatedly noted that his research showed clear evidence that both men’s and women’s participation have increased during the last 15 years.

“For Title IX, I present three different pieces of evidence that indicate that, on average, schools have responded to Title IX by increasing women’s participation rather than decreasing men’s participation,” Cheslock said.

He said there are no simple explanations why sports like wrestling and men’s gymnastics have declined in participation, but possible reasons could be the relatively high number of injuries and the high cost of insurance. Sports that have seen increases in participation, such as lacrosse, have students with high academic qualifications and tend to be of higher income levels, things that are of potential interest to college presidents and athletic directors. [To read the entire story, go to: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_11739.shtml ]