Nearly three decades have passed since former President Richard Nixon signed the legislation that would dramatically change the world of women's sports.
Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 mandates that no person can be excluded from benefits or activities based on sex, and though the law technically applies to any educational program receiving federal funds, in practical application, Title IX has most impacted college sports.
The number of female athletes has more than quadrupled at the college level from 31,000 in 1980-81 to 148,803 in 1998-99, according to the Women's Sports Foundation.
"It's important because it does so much to put women on a similar -- excuse the pun -- playing field as men," says College senior Jen Moore, a softball player. "It just opens up so many more doors for them."
Now, just like their male counterparts, when women athletes travel, the busses they ride, the hotels they stay in and the meals they eat are paid for by the athletic department, which sponsors 17 varsity-level sports for men and 16 varsity-level sports for women.
"Essentially we offer comparable opportunities to men and women," Associate Director of Athletics Mary DiStansislao says. "We also have done whatever we could to meet the needs of our student athletes in terms of sports."
But female athletes have not always fared so well. The 1970s marked a time of changes and improvements for women's athletics as Penn.ÿFacilities were upgraded, varsity teams were added for women, and coaches went from only being able to accept walk-on players to actively recruiting female high school athletes.
Since then, the University has continued to beef up women's programs, adding women's varsity soccer in 1991, and women's varsity golf last year.
"We've been adding sports as there's been a sufficient demand for a sport," DiStansislao says.
To comply with Title IX, a school must have matching male-female ratios among the student body and student athletes, show there is a historical and continuing improvement in providing gender equity, or show that the school equally accommodates athletic interest and ability for both sexes. The first standard has been emphasized most in recent years.
And now, some athletic officials now find themselves in a position where they cannot afford to add more women's programs to meet this standard, cutting men's programs instead.
"In a lot of schools the female sports don't bring in as much as the male sports, and if we didn't have this rule, I would be concerned that schools would start cutting down the female programs just for money reasons," says College sophomore Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan, a volleyball player who also is a reporter for The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Fifty-four percent of the athletic directors for schools in Division I-A of the NCAA who dropped sports said they did so to meet Title IX requirements. Though some expensive men's programs at Penn, such as varsity ice hockey, have been dropped, Athletic Director Steve Bilsky says these were not to meet Title IX standards, but were the unfortunate result of a limited budget.
"That's one of the things that has set us apart in a positive way -- that we haven't [met the standards] at the expense of of one gender," Bilsky says. "We've focused on trying to improve women's sports because that's the right thing to do."
This focus was born, in part, when the Women's Law Project of Philadelphia filed a complaint in 1994 on behalf of Penn women athletes and women's team coaches, stating that the University was not meeting the stipulations of Title IX.
After a few months of negotiations, the University agreed to settle out of court, avoiding millions of dollars in legal fees that plagued other institutions fighting Title IX suits.
The settlement mandated that the University renovate the crew team's boathouse, hire a weight trainer and make the women's gymnastics and squash coaches and field hockey and lacrosse assistant coaches full-time.
And now, female athletes say that Penn adequately funds and supports women's teams.
"I think Penn's really good about that," Kwak-Hefferan says. "We play in the Palestra, where the men play basketball and I think it's a great venue."
