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ADA Updates
In yesterday’s Washington Post op-ed “A Threat in Title IX,” Christina Hoff Sommers misrepresented the role Title IX can play in fostering equal educational opportunity for women in the largest and richest sector of higher education -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics. She also misrepresented the history of Title IX – its goals, impacts, and struggles. Sommers raises the specter of quotas and rigid parity in a call to arms against efforts to correct the severe underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. To spread the panic, she rabble-rouses male jocks with tired tales of how men’s sports have suffered as women have gained sports opportunities. To score some points with fans of the Obama administration, she sucks up to Larry Summers with a baleful lament of his exit from Harvard. Finally, she tugs at our patriotism with a claim that national security requires men to continue their near-monopoly of the hard sciences and engineering. Sommers misleads on all counts. Although Title IX is famously associated with women’s athletics, sports were not the primary concern of the legislators who first advocated and defended Title IX when it was enacted in 1972. The mothers of Title IX had experienced and witnessed sex-based discrimination in education: from the outright exclusion of women from certain fields; to the icy discouragement of women who attempted certain fields; to the gender-socializing effects of educational processes, including the classroom climate, scholarship opportunities, guidance counseling, and school sports. All of these impediments to women’s full pursuit of educational development were the targets of Title IX. Although Title IX passed easily through the first Congress to consider it, its fate has been precarious ever since. Long before Sommers derided Title IX’s effects and potential, legions of naysayers have tried to defeat it through judicial retraction, presidential action, and bureaucratic inaction. Ridicule being the last resort of the misinformed, thirty five years of naysayers, including Sommers, often have issued cultural broadsides demeaning women’s efforts to deploy their gifts in historically male-dominated fields. The terrain for many of these assaults on gender equity in education has been school sports – specifically, how opening opportunities for women hurts men. Title IX’s impact has been dramatic – just look at today’s law schools and medical schools. But, sadly, Title IX’s enforcement across three decades has been inconsistent and incomplete. Many schools don’t inform their students about Title IX, so many students are not aware that they have a right to a gender-equitable learning environment. Under the best of circumstances, federal enforcement happens only when a member of an educational institution recognizes discrimination, knows the law protects her against it, and files a complaint. Sommers may imagine that there’s too much Title IX enforcement; in fact, it’s not enforced enough. One result is that another generation of girls and women has been either discouraged from entering or redirected away from math and science fields. When this happens, women are prevented from gratifying their academic interests. Equally important, they are prevented from entering the labor market on pathways to excellent jobs and excellent wages. Most importantly, the nation is deprived the service of all its talent. We wish that Sommers’s simplistic prediction were true: that Title IX’s role in STEM education was about imposing gender “proportionality” on participation in STEM fields. That would mean that we need only to worry about admissions decisions; maybe funding, too. But the problem is much larger than one of gate keeping. The problem includes the climate for women science scholars, how labs are run, the clock for promotion, not to mention the climate for women to be “squints” in elementary and secondary school classrooms and the possibility for squints to be female in what remains a male bastion, Title IX notwithstanding Dr. Gwendolyn Mink Gwendolyn Mink is an author and educator. She is the daughter of the late Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink, who was one of the mothers of Title IX. She also serves on the board of Americans for Democratic Action. |