In response to Title IX, the Conference dropped swimming, wrestling and gymnastics; three classic collegiate sports. Even though swimming and gymnastics "ought" to have been tailor-made to meet Title IX requirements, the budgets needed the funds to fund exclusively female sports to counter the remaining conference sports. College Football has always been tacitly exempt from being counted in Title IX settings, as long as schools show a "commitment" to funding female sports.
The problem has been that women don't participate in organized sports at the collegiate level in the same way that men do, and that represents a distinct change from their high school years, when they do.
I did a study for UM Campus Rec a number of years ago, and I found the paper and see that I wrote this:
"We now see, for instance, that at the high school level, gender equity has indeed vastly improved female participation in sports. In 1998, for instance, 454,000 girls participated in high school basketball programs. At the college level, only 20,910 women participated, including NCAA, NAIA, and NJCAA basketball programs. ...
The largest indoor recreation program at UM is the basketball intramural program. Basketball is a relatively expensive facility sport in that it needs a large open area, a specialized floor, and accomodates relatively few participants on a large square footage at one time. Because of the large space volume, it consumes relatively large energy requirements in heat and light on an ongoing basis.
After nearly 30 years of Title IX, it also consists overwhelmingly of male participants.
In 1980, basketball intramural programs at UM consisted of approximately 60 men's teams, 6 co-rec, and five women's. In 1999, there were nearly 90 men's teams, 23 co-rec, and four women=s. In spite of gender-equity programs, this trend has reflected the general trend among all intramural sport activities.
On the other hand, female participation in individual physical exercise activities more approximately resembles the proportion of the female population of students and faculty, roughly 54%. The women are using the gyms as much as men, but they do so on treadmills, on weight machines, on a relatively narrow range of activity options. After more than two decades of "liberation," we are seeing fundamentally different ways in which men and women utilize sport opportunities. Men tend to see sport as a social activity requiring extensive facilities and equipment. Women tend to see sport in a much narrower focus, for very personal goals of physical fitness which, however, generally requires an investment in facilities considerably less than their male counterparts.
"This experience at the University of Montana reflects national experience where female participation on intramural teams of all kinds remains stagnant at between 4 and 8%, except where women choose to participate with men at the intramural level, which reflects a 15% participation rate. Open or free gym use by women is anecdotally but consistently described as virtually nil. Women rarely go shoot baskets. At the University of Delaware, the entire intramural program consists of 73% men's teams, 23% co-ed teams, and 4% women's teams. Women do not like the competitive or organized sports, and when they do participate, it is usually with men. Indeed, even in the co-ed sports, sport directors are reporting that the women are on the teams because the men bring them along to comply with the 50/50 gender requirement for the co-ed teams.
Early in this era of gender equity, the argument was made that women did not participate in college-level sport activities as a matter of cultural training. If this was indeed true at some point in time, it can no longer explain what represents, actually, a decline in participation, even as college enrollment of women has dramatically increased, and that this increase now includes large numbers of women who have enjoyed multiple opportunities in sport participation at the personal, grade school and high school level.
....
At the University of Montana, we see that same pattern. To comply with Title IX, the varsity sports program had cut wrestling, gymnastics, men's golf and swimming. It added women's volleyball, women's basketball, women's golf and tennis. The danger of Title IX, for which there is no statutory protection, is to simply cut athletic opportunities for males, automatically increasing the statistical opportunity of females to participate relative to males. The net result is that athletic opportunity overall has been constricted."
