Bush administration creates Title IX 'loophole'
This March, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights added to Title IX, the 1972 law aimed to provide women and men equal opportunities to participate in collegiate varsity sports, what many are calling a loophole for those schools who already do not want to add female sports teams. This "clarification" to the law gives schools the ability to not add female sports teams if inadequate female interest in sports is expressed in campus-wide internet surveys. Since the inception of Title IX, schools that receive government funding could satisfy the requirements of the law in any one of three ways, called prongs: The school must make the number and quality of athletic opportunities for men and women proportionate to the relative enrollment of men or women. The school must demonstrate continued progress toward achieving prong one. The school must show that the underrepresented group, in most cases women, has insufficient interest in sports to justify the addition of more female sports teams. Before this adjustment, surveys, especially internet surveys, were not allowed as a sufficient measure to demonstrate girls' disinterest in athletics.