30 years of Title IX.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Thirty years ago today, President Richard Nixon signed an omnibus education bill that included 10 sections, or titles. Only one of these is still debated today: Title IX, which forbids "any education program receiving federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex." And the debate concerns only one corner of the vast educational establishment: athletics.

Conservative Southern congressmen put Title IX in the bill hoping that it would derail the legislation. But supporters, including Rep. Edith Green, R-Ore., embraced the idea of ending sex discrimination in federally supported schools. No one today argues about whether men and women should be treated equally in, say, college admissions. But to a degree neither the bill's supporters nor opponents imagined 30 years ago, efforts to achieve equality in athletic opportunities have become a cause of continuing controversy.

In 1972, men outnumbered women by more than five to one on American college sports teams. Today, there are 209,000 men on college varsity teams and 151,000 women. That's not perfect equality - Title IX has been interpreted to require that sports participation reflect the proportions of men and women in the student body, and women slightly outnumber men on college campuses. But the growth of women's sports programs has been revolutionary.

The revolution, critics grumble, has come at men's expense. Colleges across the country, they say, have dropped men's sports such as wrestling, tennis and track to make room for women's sports such as basketball, softball and gymnastics. This view assumes that athletics is a zero-sum game, in which any gain for one gender must come at the other's expense.

The reality is more complicated. The gap between men's and women's sports programs is narrow compared to the chasm between programs that make money and programs that don't. On most college campuses, including the University of Oregon, football pays most of the bill for the entire athletic program, with men's basketball playing a distant secondary role. With rare exceptions, every sport except those two loses money and requires a subsidy.

This disparity accounts for some of the glaring inequalities that remain 30 years after Title IX. At the UO, for instance, head coaches for men's teams make an average yearly salary of $168,000, while coaches of women's teams are paid an average of $71,000. That's because universities across the country need successful football and men's basketball programs to act as the economic engines for the rest of their athletic departments, pushing winning coaches' salaries into the stratosphere.

The fact that men play the two profitable sports tends to obscure the fact that most intercollegiate athletic programs, for men and women alike, need financial support. University athletic directors' budgetary decisions don't really pit men's sports against women's. Instead, they apportion the income from a few profitable sports among many other programs for both men and women. The question isn't whether a university will have a women's crew team or a men's wrestling squad. It's whether football will generate enough money to pay for either one.

In other respects, progress toward gender equity has been remarkable. Male athletes still outnumber female athletes on college campuses, but the gap has narrowed: The UO has 258 men and 221 women on its teams. Women now have more sports teams than men on most campuses - the UO, for instance, has nine women's teams and seven for men. Women's teams' share of athletic budgets continues to grow, despite the comparatively large cost of fielding a men's football team.

Some disparities between men's and women's sports will persist as long as football dominates athletic finances. Perhaps in another 30 years, the revenue potential of women's sports will begin to be realized, and the remaining gaps will begin to close. In the meantime, women's sports should not be blamed for financial problems that afflict athletic programs for both genders.