Equality of Opportunity This Is Not

The problem with gender quotas, this time at Dixie State College, as captured in this article:

If the Red Storm are to add a sport, it would almost certainly be women’s track and field.

The school is undergoing a gender-equity plan in an attempt to become Title IX compliant.

The school added women’s golf – which was part of the plan – and isn’t in immediate dangers of facing penalties for failure to be within Title IX’s bylaws.

“If were to add a men’s team (next), we’d be setting ourselves up for potential issues down the road,” Boothe said. “We don’t want to drop men’s sports. It’s not something we want or need to do. It’s not even in consideration.”

Boothe said the program is looking at adding one of three sports on the women’s side – track and field, lacrosse or swimming. With the conference’s decision to sponsor track and field, it made sense for Boothe to look into the potential of adding a women’s track and field team.

How about using proven student interest when deciding to add sports teams, instead of generalized quota numbers? It’s time to reform Title IX so that Prong 1 at the college level — proportionality — cannot continue to discriminate against male athletes so as to deny them opportunities to participate in sports, and therefore, violate Title IX’s purpose of preventing gender discrimination. What quota activists and proponents of “gender equity” programs fail to realize, or ignore, is that creating teams for females solely for the sake of making participation numbers equal is not actually helping. Allowing both genders to enjoy equality of opportunity means finding out their interests, allowing them to join sports if they desire and making sensible decisions to accommodate them — not blatantly cutting teams and rosters for the sake of only one sex.