50 years after Title IX, spending on women’s college sports still falls short

By Mike Lowe

During her 28 years as a college basketball head coach, Joanne P. McCallie often had to push her bosses to provide more for her women’s teams.

She would look at the men’s basketball programs where she worked and see the inequities: higher salaries for the coaches, a larger travel budget, newer uniforms, better training and support resources.

Sometimes, McCallie said, she had to “look at other jobs” to get the attention of her administration. It happened during her eight years at the University of Maine, and it happened during her 13 years at Duke University. Once she showed she was thinking of leaving, increases in salaries or resources usually followed.

“The action has to be very overt,” said McCallie, who won 71.7 percent of her games and was honored as National Coach of the Year in 2005 while at Michigan State. “(When) you’ve got to actually get on an airplane and go look at (another) school in order to get movement from your own school, something is wrong with that. And that shows it’s not the kind of progress we want.”

Fifty years after the enactment of Title IX, the groundbreaking federal law that prohibits discrimination or exclusion from participation based on sex at any college or university that receives federal money, many schools do not provide equitable resources for men’s and women’s sports.