Sex Discrimination in College & Pro Sports

This research paper discusses gender or sex discrimination

in college and professional sports. In the 1970s and 1980s, female athletes made substantial progress toward achieving equal rights in collegiate athletics through litigation and the threat of litigation. Women coaches made less progress. The entire movement suffered some loss of momentum after the late 1980s because of more restrictive court rulings, funding problems and other factors. Female athletes have hardly made a dent in professional sports, except in certain non-contact sports such as tennis, golf and track.

Until the broader womens movement began to assert itself in the 1960s, little progress was made toward securing equal rights for women in collegiate and amateur athletics in the United States because of the traditional attitudes of most Americans toward women in sports. Athletics were considered a male preserve, apart from the exploits of a handful of women with exceptional skills in noncontact supports, such as Babe Didrickson Zaharias who won several major golf titles in the 1930s and similar achievements by female tennis stars. The first women's marathon in Olympic track did not occur until 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics. The only professional women's baseball team was the All-American Girls League which former Chicago Cub owner Phil Wrigley organized in 1943 and which folded after men came home from World War II. Females wh

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l programs were not excluded from their holding that Washington State could not maintain sex-based athletic programs under that state's equal rights law, but ruled that "an individual sports program could use all the revenue generated by that particular program without violating" the law. Womens rights advocates argue that there is no reason to give football programs special treatment and point out that most of them lose money. Nevertheless, the Collage Football Association and the American Football Association have been attempting recently to secure an exemption of college football from the scope of Title IX. In recent cases involving Brown and Colgate, the federal courts have been employing a strict "proportionality" test in determining whether those universities were in compliance with Title IX. Brown was found not to be in compliance because only 40 percent of undergraduates participated in varsity athletics even though 53 percent of undergraduates are women. Rep. Dennis Hestert (R. Ill.), a former coach himself, argues that the proportionality rule is flawed in that "it fails to account for a lower interest in sports among women that makes it difficult for a school to ensure their participation at the same level as their p
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2924
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)