Small Colleges Lag on Sports Opportunities for Women
From The Chronicle of Higher Education - June 18, 2004
By WELCH SUGGS
Major programs take the critical heat but actually do better, new data show

Colleges with major sports programs, which have faced the most complaints about their treatment of women in intercollegiate athletics, have far more female athletes, proportionately, than do smaller institutions, according to a Chronicle analysis of data provided to the federal government.

However, those smaller colleges often give a larger share of their sports budgets to women's teams than do members of big-time Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Reports submitted to the U.S. Department of Education also show that many colleges, large and small, do not appear to have gotten the message about gender equity in sports. At 707 institutions, the proportion of women playing sports lagged behind the proportion of women in the student body by more than 20 percentage points.

In 2002-3, 120 colleges gave women a significantly smaller share of scholarship dollars than the amount specified by guidelines issued under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that bans gender discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds. The Education Department has said that athletics scholarships should be awarded to women in exactly the same proportion as there are women on varsity teams, absent nondiscriminatory circumstances.

The 120 colleges fell short in their scholarship allocations by at least five percentage points. At more than 230 institutions, women's sports received less than 30 percent of the operating budget for all athletics teams.

Being in any of those groups of colleges does not automatically amount to a violation of Title IX because compliance with the law can be measured only by an investigation by the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights.

But it indicates that at colleges outside the media glare of Division I, progress toward gender equity generally has been slower.

Over all, the data show that women were about 40 percent of college athletes. That is roughly the reverse of their proportion of the entire student population, where women were approaching the 60-percent mark.

On the whole, women's teams received about 36 percent of operating expenses for athletics departments, on average. In Division I, that number was only 34 percent. In Division III, however, women's teams got 41 percent of sports budgets, and colleges in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics allocated 42 percent to women.

The data come from reports filed with the Department of Education by almost 2,000 institutions, including not only the 325 colleges in Division I but also more than 1,600 other institutions, in Divisions II and III of the NCAA and in the NAIA, as well as two-year colleges and other institutions. This is the first year that The Chronicle has included institutions other than those in Division I in its analysis of the Education Department data.

Different Roles for Sports

Athletics plays very different roles in the affairs of different kinds of colleges. At large state universities in the South, for example, students and fans live and die with their football teams, and such institutions field relatively few teams in other sports, for men or women. Small colleges in New England, on the other hand, sponsor sports that should be on endangered-species lists, like squash and sailing. At many colleges in the Midwest, male athletes outnumber female athletes two to one, mainly because sports programs, particularly football, are used to attract men.

Adding sports teams, like adding any other program, is "based on economic need, period," says Steve Baker, president of the NAIA. "There's a lot of pressure on private schools to remain open, and certainly adding football and providing a larger student body is a strategy schools are using."

Among colleges in the NCAA's Division III, athletes represented 10 percent of the student body, on average. At two-year colleges, less than 2 percent of students were athletes. In NCAA's Division I, which includes most of the major research universities, only about 3 percent of students were varsity athletes.

Despite those numbers, participation and spending trends did not vary markedly among colleges in different divisions and affiliations. Colleges that spent a lot on women's sports and those that did not were found in every division, from the smallest community colleges to the largest state universities.

On the whole, though, junior colleges and members of the NCAA's Division II appeared to be offering fewer sports opportunities to women than other institutions did. At community colleges, women accounted for only 37 percent of athletes, although they outnumbered men by a 3-to-2 margin among all students. Division II's numbers were only slightly better.

"One of the problems we have is that many of our schools attempt to field a women's team, but at the end of the semester or in January a number of our women's programs fold for lack of participants," says George E. Killian, executive director of the National Junior College Athletic Association. "I can't tell you how many times I've gotten those letters. We have very few men's teams fold at the semester -- only once in a great while."

Struggling in Certain States

Differences in spending and participation trends from state to state were particularly striking. In Nevada more than half of all college athletes were women, but in New Mexico the proportion was only a third. In Arkansas less than 30 percent of athletics-department budgets went to women's teams; in New Hampshire 47 percent did.

Colleges outside the NCAA's Division I have rarely faced scrutiny under Title IX, but that is changing in some states. A report commissioned by the California Postsecondary Education Commission found that 84 percent of that state's community colleges were out of compliance with the law, as were 43 percent of four-year institutions. The report recommended several steps to bring colleges more in line with established standards.

In South Dakota, the Board of Regents for higher education, which received a report on gender equity in athletics at all public colleges in the state, voted in March to increase the student-activity fee to 5.9 percent of tuition for all students, specifically to cover the cost of Title IX compliance in athletics.

The academic year covered by the survey, 2002-3, was the first for which The Chronicle was able to get data from the Education Department, which began collecting reports under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act in 2001-2 from coeducational institutions with athletics programs.