National Organization     for Women

TITLE IX-EDUCATION

We want our girls and young women to have the drive to win and accomplish their goals.  For this to happen, equal educational opportunities are needed.  The passage of Title IX in 1972 gave women the ability to accomplish just that. 

June 23, 2006 marked Title IX’s 34^th anniversary in fighting sex discrimination in federally-funded schools and educational programs in the United States. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in admissions, housing and facilities, courses, career and counseling services, student financial aid, health and insurance benefits for enrolled students, and scholastic, intercollegiate, club, or intramural athletics. The law, most often associated with prohibiting discrimination in athletics, was created and has broken new ground in working to level the playing field in all aspects of education.  

Title IX also prohibits sexual harassment of students. It includes any unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior that significantly interferes with a student's access to educational opportunities.

Even though 34 years have passed, the enforcement of Title IX is still needed.  Women remain underrepresented in traditionally male fields that lead to greater earning power after graduation. While women received 75 percent of all education degrees awarded during the 1997-98 academic year, they received only 18 percent of all engineering degrees. Women also continue to lag behind in earning doctoral and professional degrees.

In sports, while women's participation in athletics has grown steadily over the past 30 years, women athletes continue to get fewer teams, fewer scholarships and lower budgets than their male counterparts. For every $1 spent on women's athletics, $3 is spent on men's programs.

Sexual harassment in schools is still totally commonplace -- for girls and boys.  Eight in 10 students experience some form of harassment during their school years, and more than 25% of them experience it often. Girls are more likely than boys to experience sexual harassment, but boys today are more likely to be harassed than boys were in 1993.  60% of students experience physical sexual harassment at some point in their school years.

Typical harassment complaints still include: making sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks; claiming that a person is gay or lesbian; spreading sexual rumors about a person; touching, grabbing or pinching someone in a sexual way; intentionally brushing up against someone in a sexual way; and flashing or "mooning" someone.

To ensure that girls and young women continue to have equal opportunities, work to protect and strengthen Title IX by:

• Working to end sexual harassment in your schools;

• Advocating for fixing the problems in co-educational environments rather than sex segregating;

• Opposing sex-based tracks and gender-stereotyped courses and instruction that send girls to cosmetology and daycare and boys to engineering and computer science; and

Ohio NOW has remained committed to the protection and enforcement of this law. As we celebrate the success of the almost three and a half decades of Title IX, it is important that we recognize that equity is still an issue and continue our work to protect the strides which women have made.