Despite Title IX, gap continues in funding

Penn was last in the Ivies in percent of athletic funds spent on women. While men's athletic teams received more funding than women's teams at all Ivy League schools during the last school year, statistics show that the athletic gender gap was the biggest at Penn. According to Penn's 1998-99 Equity in Athletic Department Act report, the University's funding was the most lopsided in the league, with about 67 percent of its gender-allocated funding -- almost $3.6 million -- going to men's athletics teams, leaving women's teams with only about $1.8 million. Funding at peer institutions was closer to equal, with the average funding split of the schools falling around 60 percent to 40 percent in favor of males. Dartmouth College Athletic Director Dick Jaeger said his department tries to keep gender equity a top priority, particularly when determining funding. "We just have to be vigilant when we allocate our resources to make sure the funding is as equitable as we can make it," Jaeger said, adding that it takes small sacrifices to make funding as equal as possible. For example, athletes at Dartmouth have a lower amount of money for meals, but the savings are passed on to women's teams to make funding more equitable, Jaeger said, adding that men's athletics are never shortchanged to make things more equitable. All NCAA schools have been required by Congress to release EADA reports since the government passed Title IX, mandating that all universities receiving federal funding provide equal resources for male and female athletics. Penn athletic officials cautioned against comparing financial data among universities. "All schools have different budget and accounting systems, so comparisons are difficult and, sometimes, misleading," Penn Athletic Director, Steve Bilsky said. Bilsky also said that Penn had one-time expenses during the past year that might have adversely affected the figures in Penn's EADA report, such as a men's basketball trip to Italy in the summer of 1998. Among the Ivies, Penn also has the fewest number of female varsity athletes per number of male athletes. Although females accounted for almost half of the student body, Penn's report revealed that female athletes made up about 39 percent of participating athletes at Penn. At most other Ivy League schools, the participation gap was smaller, with men making up about 54 percent of participating athletes and women forming the remaining 46 percent at the schools. Brown University was the only Ivy with more female athletes than males -- 53 percent of Brown athletes were women during the 1998-99 year. Those numbers corresponded roughly with enrollment figures at Brown, whose student body was about 46 percent male and 54 percent female last year. According to Mark Nickel, a Brown spokesperson, the closeness of the two figures is the result of a six-year legal battle over Brown's Title IX compliance. In 1993, a Washington, D.C., law firm sued Brown, claiming that the school violated Title IX statutes by cutting funding from its women's gymnastics and volleyball teams. The case ended in a settlement stipulating that Brown's funding of women's athletics stay within 3.5 percentage points of the percentage of women students enrolled at Brown. The reports also showed that disparities between the revenues of men's and women's squads persisted at each of the schools during the past school year. At Penn, about 90 percent of the Athletic Department's revenues came from men's teams. At most other Ivies, men's athletic teams pulled in about 74 percent of the Athletic Department's total revenues. Yale had the most conspicuous disparity during the past year, with its men's teams generating more than 99 percent -- or $775,800 -- of the Athletic Department's total revenue -- and its women's squads bringing in just 5 percent, or $5,691. The statistics also detail inequalities in the salaries of head coaches for men's and women's teams. Head coaches of various men's teams made about $11,000 more than head coaches of women's teams at most Ivies last year. At Penn, however, coaches of men's teams earned an average salary $15,000 greater than that of the coaches of women's teams. Only Cornell University had a greater disparity among men's and women's teams' head coach salaries than Penn, reporting a difference of more than $17,000. The salaries of head coaches are not determined by the Athletic Department at Penn but by the Office of Human Resources, which takes a variety of professional information into account when determining salaries. "Experience and market factors influence salaries as they do for all academic and administrative areas within the institution," Bilsky said. Bilsky said funding inequality between men's and women's teams has slowly decreased in recent years. "[We expect] that the differences in per capita operating expenses between men and women will continue to close because of increased squad sizes, increased travel opportunities and more extensive recruitment for women's teams," Bilsky said.