Title IX…Well, it’s a start.

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…

-U.S. Code Sect. 20

This part of the 1972 educational amendments helps regulate how many female athletes a college needs to have and the sports they offer, but the budgets for female athletics to not have to be equal to that of males, but it has to be comparable.

I find the word “comparable” infuriatingly vague. After all, you can compare the $10,000,000 to $3.50.

Still, Title XI, renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity Educational Act in 2002, did not explicitly mention sports, but it’s contributions to athletics cannot be ignored.

Title IX controversy continues even today, 38 years after it was enacted.

According George J. Bryjak’s July 2000 article for USA Today, ” The application of Title IX is considered unfair because female students do not demonstrate the same enthusiasm for sports participation as their male counterparts.”

Despite those against Title IX, many agree that a lot of women’s athletics would not be possible without it. Still, we have a long way to go. There’s no chance for women to be taken seriously in sports as long as athletes insult each other by saying they “throw like a girl.” And when women perform well in athletics, their success should not be referred to on masculine terms, which is a common occurrence pretty much from the womb. Girls who like sports when I grew up were always called tomboys. I always thought it was an insult.