Title IX and Athletics

Substantial Proportionality

The first way in which institutions may comply with Title IX is to ensure that each gender's representation in varsity athletics is substantially proportionate to its representation in the student body. Of course, the fact that the OCR expects a gender's representation among athletes to be “substantially proportionate” to that gender's representation in the student body necessarily begs the question of what is meant by “substantially proportionate.” In 1996, the OCR clarified that athletic opportunities are “substantially proportionate when the number of opportunities that would be required to achieve proportionality would not be sufficient to sustain a viable team, meaning a team for which there is a sufficient number of interested and able students as well as enough available competition to sustain an intercollegiate team.” In plain English, the OCR first decides how many additional opportunities must be offered to the underrepresented gender in order to achieve perfect proportionality. If this number is sufficient to field a viable team, then institutions are not considered substantially proportionate and must add a team.

As an illustration of how the OCR test works, suppose that university with a student body that is 55% female presently offers 700 athletic participation opportunities. Of these chances, men have 385 athletic participation opportunities while women have 315 participation opportunities. Under this example, this means that women represent 45% of the athletes (315 divided by 700) even though they account for 55% of the full-time undergraduate students. The first step for institutional officials would be to consider how many opportunities they must add for women in order to achieve perfect proportionality of 55%. If male participation remains constant, which is the assumption that the OCR employs, university officials must add 156 participation opportunities for women. If university officials did so, then there would be 471 female opportunities (315 current + 156 additional) and 385 male opportunities (all current). The second step is for officials to address whether the number of new participation opportunities required, 156 in this example, is sufficient to field a viable team. Clearly, this would be sufficient. In fact, a university could field seven or eight new women's teams with 156 additional opportunities.

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