Title IX helps girls, but leaves boys behind, women's advocate contends

Campus Reform reports:

An official for a national women’s advocacy group claims that Title IX is used “almost exclusively as a tool for advancing women’s interests,” rather than for promoting true gender equality.

Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) Managing Director Carrie Lukas argues in a recent op-ed for Acculturated that an excessive focus on the areas in which males outperform females has led society to overlook the many areas in which the opposite imbalance holds sway.


Citing a study featured in Education Week asserting that struggles with calculus cause women to drop out of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields at higher rates than their male peers, Lukas said she finds “frustrating” the study’s implication that “systematic sexism” is to blame whenever women lag behind men.

“Yes, there are areas of study in which men outperform women—and this could partially be a result of a failure of educators to optimally engage women—but there are also plenty of disciplines that women dominate and it’s men who are being given the short-shift in terms of educational opportunities and attention,” she points out.

Lukas criticizes Title IX’s “fixation” on sports as one of the few extracurricular activities where male students are more likely to participate than females. In contrast, she notes, female students are much more likely to participate in government, newspapers, theater, and music programs than males, yet “no one contemplates yanking funding from a school that fails to cast as many men as women in their school play or that fails a ‘proportionality test’ in student government or on the campus newspaper masthead.”

No word yet on when the feminists will call for getting rid of sex segregated sports teams in the name of equality.