License to Thrive

Before Title IX

Many people associate the Title IX legislation solely with sports. In fact, sports is only one of the areas included in the legislation. Prior to Title IX, women faced obstacles and discrimination in numerous areas including admissions standards, access to financial aid, and access to graduate programs for computer science and engineering as well as professional degree programs such as law school and medical school.

Birch Bayh, former U.S. Senator from Indiana and one of the key architects of the legislation, said that he always believed the most valuable results of Title IX would come via academic equality, not on the playing field. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics shows that in 1971-72, women received 44 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, 41 percent of all master’s degrees, 16 percent of all doctorate degrees and 6 percent of all “first” professional degrees which include medicine, optometry, dentistry, law, veterinary medicine, pharmacy and theological professions among others. Twenty-eight years after the passage of Title IX, from 1999-2000, these figures had increased to 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, 58 percent of all master’s degrees, 44 percent of all doctorate degrees and 45 percent of all first professional degrees.

Before Title IX:

• Many colleges and universities required women to have higher test scores and better grades than male applicants to gain admission
• Numerous medical and law schools limited the number of women admitted to 15 or fewer per school.
• Financial aid was withheld from women who were married, pregnant, or had children.
• The majority of prestigious scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, was restricted only to men.
• Women faculty members were excluded from faculty clubs.
• University of Virginia excluded women until 1970.
• Female students were not allowed to take certain courses, such as auto mechanics or criminal justice; male students could not take home economics.
• Almost no colleges offered women athletic scholarships. The primary exception to this were the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s).