Celebrating Title IX, Equality, and the Power of Public/Private Co-Creation

Have you enjoyed watching the U.S. women’s national soccer team dominate the World Cup over the last several decades? If so, you can thank a conceptually simple change in federal law known as Title IX.?

Passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, Title IX simply said there could be no discrimination based on gender “under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Given sports are an “activity,” girls’ sports became funded to a degree never before seen (after the requisite legal wrangling, of course, initiated by some who argued competition was only good for boys).?

As a result, the number of girls playing high school soccer in the U.S. went from a grand total of 700 in 1972 to nearly 400,000 in 2018—and the U.S. women’s national team now has four World Cup trophies for us to admire.?

The ripple effects of Title IX extend way beyond the soccer pitch, however. As the sports columnist Sally Jenkins has observed:

Title IX didn’t lay waste to men’s athletic programs. Title IX laid waste to?everything. It laid waste to?ideas?— men’s ideas of what women were capable of, but most importantly, women’s ideas about?themselves.

According to a study by the Women's Sports Foundation , 3 million more high school girls have opportunities to participate in sports now than they did before Title IX. Girls comprised 7% of high school athletes participating on varsity teams in 1972; in 2018‐19, that figure rose to 43%. Today, women make up 44% of all college athletes, compared with 15% before Title IX.?

What’s more,?in 1970, before Title IX, women earned just 10% of all doctorates in the United States. Now, on the 50th anniversary of Title IX's passage, they earn 54%.?Before Title IX, women were just 9% of medical school entrants. Now they are 53%. Before Title IX, women were just 14% of law school entrants. Now they are 54%.

The U.S. woman’s national soccer team’s evolution also shows the important roles that must be played by three types of actors who must work together to co-create the future: government, organizations, and individuals. Government set the rules for how schools had to treat girls’ sports. Organizations innovated within those rules. High schools and colleges began competing for dominance, and then youth soccer clubs popped up all over the country, providing a level of early developmental training seen in few sports to that point. Kids (and parents) saw an opportunity and worked like crazy to seize it.?

We need a lot more of that kind of co-creation.

This article is adapted and updated from "A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the world we can proudly leave to our kids by 2050 ," coauthored with Paul B. Carroll and Tim Andrews. You can download a free copy of that book through July 5, 2022.