OPINION: Cheerleading suit shows Title IX may have outlived its usefulness

Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, is the author of "Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood." This first appeared on Mindingthecampus.com.

Connecticut's Quinnipiac College, best known for its political polling, is now at the center of the newest round in the controversy over Title IX and women's sports. In a trial that opened last month, a federal judge must decide whether competitive cheerleading should count as a sport for gender equity purposes. The case illustrates the complexities - and some would say, the inanities - of the debate over gender and college athletics.

In March 2009, Quinnipiac announced that it was eliminating several athletic programs, including women's volleyball, due to recession-related budget cuts. On the other hand, the school added a new team to its women's sports roster: a competitive cheerleading squad. Women's volleyball coach Robin Sparks and four team members sued, claiming a violation of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments. The team got a temporary reprieve pending the outcome of the lawsuit.

Last year's budget cuts did not spare the male athletic teams at Quinnipiac. Men's golf and outdoor track were dropped along with women's volleyball, with no reprieve or reversal. Other men's teams were forced to downsize their rosters. Some would say that, when two men's teams are cut while women lose 11 slots on the volleyball team and gain 30 on the cheer squad, it's not the women who should be complaining.

Of course, the question is whether competitive cheering is a "real sport." The National Collegiate Athletic Association still doesn't recognize it as a varsity sport, though there's a push to change that. Still, college cheerleading in the 21st century has come a long way: It requires high levels of athleticism and technical skill and features national competitions. Most of the young women on Quinnipiac's cheer squad are top-grade gymnasts.

Indeed, one might argue that the denigration of cheerleading, very much in evidence from the plaintiffs' side in the Quinnipiac case, reflects a mindset that feminists have usually deplored: heaping scorn on an activity simply because it is associated with a traditional feminine role.

The trial in Bridgeport has brought to light other Title IX issues, including allegations that the college had a pattern of manipulating its sports-participation data to ensure compliance with the law: artificially inflating the numbers of female athletes while undercounting the men. The reason for these intellectual gymnastics is that Title IX's guarantee of equal opportunity has been interpreted as requiring that roughly equal proportions of male and female students participate in varsity athletics.

The other two ways a school can satisfy legal requirements is to show that it is expanding opportunities for the "underrepresented sex" - that is, women - or fully and adequately accommodating its interests and abilities. These criteria, however, are so vague that proportionality is by far the most common test applied.

The concept of gender equity as gender parity, however, presents an obvious dilemma. For whatever reasons - cultural, biological or a mix of both - women generally tend to be less interested than men in competitive athletics. As a result, colleges have sought to achieve proportionality less by increasing athletic opportunities for women than by reducing them for men. The less profitable male college sports programs - track, tennis, golf, swimming, rowing and wrestling - have been decimated.

Compounding the problem, the official approach to gender parity now requires more than half of college athletic slots going to women - 56 percent of college students nationwide are now female, and at Quinnipiac, the number is 62 percent.

Perhaps it is time for the federal bureaucracy to reconsider which sex should count as "underrepresented" in higher education.