50 Years of Title IX: BWSF Voices: Equity in Sports Has Focused on Gender, Not Race. So Gaps Persist.

Traci Green, head coach of the Harvard women’s tennis team, said the racial makeup of the sport “hasn’t changed that much” since she played for Florida and won a national championship in 1998.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

Title IX, over 50 years, has heavily benefited white women over women of color. That’s partly because race has never been part of the law.

By Alanis Thames, New York Times Sports

Published June 30, 2022 Updated July 2, 2022

In 1998, Traci Green and her Florida teammates posed with an N.C.A.A. women’s tennis championship trophy after defeating Duke in five of six matchups. Green, who received a full scholarship to Florida, smiled proudly, graciously.

“I knew I was a beneficiary of Title IX, due to the history,” Green, 43, said in an interview, recognizing the opportunities that the federal law had created for women and girls in sports since its enactment in 1972.

But Green also knew that she — a Black woman on a team full of white women — represented a small number of athletes.

While Black women are certainly beneficiaries of Title IX, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in educational settings, the door it opened for sports participation has disproportionately helped white women. Black female athletes remain generally underrepresented in most programs, particularly in sports like tennis, swimming and soccer.

“It hasn’t changed that much,” said Green, now the women’s tennis coach at Harvard. She added: “On tennis teams, you’re not going to find more than one Black player.”

For all of the progress made through Title IX, many who study gender equity in sport argue that it didn’t benefit women across all races. White women, they point out, are the law’s primary beneficiaries, as the statute’s framing on gender equity — without mentioning the intersection of gender with race and income — ignores significant issues faced by many Black female athletes, coaches and administrators.

“It’s sort of good news, bad news when you think of Title IX,” said Ketra Armstrong, a sport management professor and director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Michigan. She added: “We talk about gender equity, but if you look at the numbers, we see it’s white women who are breaking the barriers, who are ascending to these leadership roles to a much greater extent than Black women are, and that’s because we’re more comfortable talking about gender.”

Some experts in sports believe that Title IX cannot solve the racial disparities in athletics.

“Title IX is strictly a gender filter. It’s hard to ask Title IX to solve a gap along the lines of race, or household income or any other category,” said Tom Farrey, a director at the Aspen Institute, which conducts research on youth and school sports in the United States. He added: “The question is do we need additional policies to address these gaps, and I would argue yes.”

Others, like Armstrong, argue that issues of race and gender are tethered, and that Title IX conversations about gender are incomplete without including race because “it’s often the essence of their race that defines them.” She said she feels people see her Blackness first, not her gender, when she walks in a room.

“It has improved opportunities for Black girls and women, and that should not be diminished,” she said. “But let’s just not be misled to think that we’ve arrived, because we haven’t. There’s still unfulfilled promises of Title IX.”

According to the N.C.A.A.’s demographics database, white women made up the largest percentage of female athletes across all three divisions at 68 percent for the 2020-21 academic year. Black women were at 11 percent, and most were concentrated in two sports: basketball, where they represented 30 percent of female athletes, and indoor and outdoor track and field (20 percent). Black women were barely represented in most other sports — 5 percent or less in softball, tennis, soccer, golf and swimming.