Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity

In 2024, a Tunisian biological male defeated a Chinese woman for Olympic women’s boxing gold. The spectacle shocked the world and renewed calls to protect single-sex women’s sports. Yet defending such boundaries in the U.S. under today’s civil rights regime is harder than it should be. Decades of Title IX enforcement have turned a seemingly modest anti-discrimination law into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering.

Title IX, passed in 1972, was intended to prohibit sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. Early regulations were flexible, as I show in a newly released report. Schools had to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of both sexes. A wide range of activities—club sports, intramurals, exercise classes—could count toward compliance. Female participation grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, largely through voluntary cultural shifts coupled with modest federal pressure.

That changed in the 1990s. Regulations narrowed the definition of athletic opportunity to varsity competition only. A subsequent court cases, Cohen v. Brown University, led to an inflexible demand placed on schools.

In order to comply with Title IX, schools had to demonstrate proportional parity between the percentage of female athletes and the percentage of female undergraduate enrollment. Federal courts and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights enforced this standard aggressively and consistently. Schools that failed to strive for proportional parity risked lawsuits.

Such lawsuits are still ongoing. Concordia-Irvine has a sex ratio among undergraduates at the national average—59% female. Females are only 51% of the athletes, however. Concordia has two sports—beach volleyball and stunt/cheer—without male equivalents.

When a budget crunch hit in 2025, Concordia announced that swimming and tennis for both men and women would be discontinued. Female athletes filed a class-action lawsuit against Concordia in August 2025, claiming that cutting women’s programs without first securing proportional parity violated Title IX. The federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against cutting the women’s tennis and swimming teams (but not against cutting the men’s sports). The female athletes have the current law on their side.

The result of Title IX regulations has been two systemic distortions. First, Title IX has imposed a male-normed, high-intensity competitive model on women’s sports. Only varsity competition counts. Cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, and recreational activities—offerings more aligned with many women’s preferences—do not. This approach sidelines broader, participation-oriented models of women’s athletics.

Second, the drive for numerical parity has come at the expense of men’s non-revenue sports. Hundreds of men’s wrestling, gymnastics, swimming, and tennis programs have been cut or capped. Schools added niche women’s sports (rowing, equestrian, beach volleyball) primarily to pad rosters and meet proportionality targets. Men’s soccer and baseball grew far more slowly than women’s soccer and softball.

These distortions wrongly assume that differences in competitiveness and interest between the sexes are merely stereotypes to be engineered away. Men and women differ in their spontaneous interest in rough, competitive, team-based sports. Boys outnumber girls by large margins in basketball clubs and recreational leagues. Cross-cultural data confirm that men participate far more in physical competition across societies. These patterns are partly natural and only partly cultural.

A better approach is possible. True equality under Title IX does not require identical outcomes or the erasure of sex differences. It requires opportunity rooted in human nature. Proportionality mandates should be eliminated. Institutions should focus on genuine accommodation rather than engineered parity. Schools should be allowed to support different pathways for those who want them, including recreational, fitness, and lower-intensity options that match average female (and some male) preferences.

Such reforms would expand real female participation, protect men’s programs, and promote healthier lifelong habits of physical activity. America’s experiment with Title IX social engineering has failed. It is time to accommodate reality instead of trying to remake it