Title IX · Episode 7 of 10 · 38 min
Title IX Beyond Sports: How It Remade Medicine, Law & STEM
Title IX's words say education, not sports, and in classrooms it dismantled the quotas that kept women to a small share of medical and law schools. It also ended routine expulsion of pregnant students and broke down the wall between shop class and home economics. Women are now roughly half of those students, though engineering and computer science lag.
Who's who
- Patsy Mink+5 more episodesHawaii congresswoman rejected by medical schools; lead author of the 1972 law
- Bernice Sandler+2 more episodesGodmother of Title IX; 1970 complaints targeted sex bias in faculty hiring
- Edith Green+3 more episodesOregon congresswoman whose hearings documented bias in admissions and tenure
- Richard Nixon+15 more episodesPresident who signed the Education Amendments of 1972
Timeline
- June 23, 1972Nixon signs the Education Amendments; Title IX takes effect
- 1975Final regulations add protections for pregnancy and bar sex-based admissions discrimination
- 2016Women become the majority of law students for the first time, at 50.3%
- 2019Women become the majority of U.S. medical students for the first time, at 50.5%
- 2023-24Women are 54.6% of medical school enrollment and about 56% of law students
Still debated
Historians credit Title IX with removing legal barriers but disagree on how much of the degree gains it caused versus the broader women's movement. Whether the engineering and computer science gap is an enforcement failure or beyond the law's reach is also argued.
← PreviousTitle IX's 50-Year Payoff: From the Field to the BoardroomNext →Is Title IX Unfair to Men? The Cut-Teams Debate
Connected episodes in other series
The Front Door and the Back Door: ERA vs. Title IXA Woman's Place · Episode 9Also features Bernice Sandler, Edith Green
The Opening: The Laws That Changed, and the ERA That DiedHaving It All · Episode 2Also features Patsy Mink
How White Evangelicals Moved From Democrat to RepublicanA Wall of Separation · Episode 7Also features Richard Nixon
How Copper Sparked the Chilean CoupBackyard Empire: The U.S. in Latin America · Episode 4Also features Richard Nixon