Title IX: Women and Girls Shall Not Be Excluded

In 1972, Title IX of the federal Education Amendments was passed. The statute declared that “no person in the Untied States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under, any education program of activity receiving federal financial assistance.” After the law was enacted, however, there followed years of what a director in the government’s Office of Civil Rights called “both intended and unintended neglect.” In 1974, the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund founded the Project on Equal Education Rights (PEER) to make sure the government was actually enforcing Title IX. Beginning in 1977, the Corporation provided PEER with a number of grants to assist its efforts to monitor Title IX, which resulted in an impressive record of improving school compliance with and government enforcement of the law.  The law addresses gender equity issues in a number of key areas including Access to Higher Education, Athletics, Career Education, Education for Pregnant and Parenting Students, Employment, Learning Environment, Math and Science, Sexual Harassment, Standardized Testing and Technology. Today, despite all these efforts, thousands of schools across the country still do not fully participate in applying the law to their own programs, so efforts to achieve true gender equity across all levels of schooling in the United States continue.