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Home – Title IX News – Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity

Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity

In 2024, a Tunisian biological male defeated a Chinese woman for Olympic women’s boxing gold. The spectacle shocked the world and renewed calls to protect single-sex women’s sports. Yet defending such boundaries in the U.S. under today’s civil rights regime is harder than it should be. Decades of Title IX enforcement have turned a seemingly modest anti-discrimination law into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering.

Title IX, passed in 1972, was intended to prohibit sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. Early regulations were flexible, as I show in a newly released report. Schools had to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of both sexes. A wide range of activities—club sports, intramurals, exercise classes—could count toward compliance. Female participation grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, largely through voluntary cultural shifts coupled with modest federal pressure.

That changed in the 1990s. Regulations narrowed the definition of athletic opportunity to varsity competition only. A subsequent court cases, Cohen v. Brown University, led to an inflexible demand placed on schools.

In order to comply with Title IX, schools had to demonstrate proportional parity between the percentage of female athletes and the percentage........

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