Is Penn Meeting Its Title IX Responsibilities?

The Daily Pennsylvanian takes a look at how Penn is performing under Title IX, the 1972 law that demands parity between men’s and women’s athletics, and finds the university wanting:

Penn has the worst proportionality of male to female athletes in the Ivy League, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics database.

Though the student body is 49 percent male and 51 percent female, 63 percent of athletes at Penn are male, while 37 percent are female.

This is a 14 percent gap in proportionality, far more than the five percent gap which Title IX requires for a school to be considered proportional. Penn Athletic Director Steve Bilsky partly blames the school’s subpar proportionality on its males-only sprint football program.

The paper adds: “Even when you take into account the athletes that participate in sprint football, of which there are 51 students currently on the roster, that would still be a 12.5 percent gap in proportionality between male and female athletes.”

The gaps aren’t just on the field: They’re in the paychecks, too. “Penn also has the second widest gap behind Yale between the average annual salary of head coaches of female teams and average annual salary of head coaches of male teams, at $38,671.” [The Daily Pennsylvanian]