SACRAMENTO Calif. — The University of California, Davis has agreed to pay more than $1.3 million to attorneys representing three women who had filed gender discrimination claims because the campus did not offer a women’s wrestling team, officials said Thursday.
The settlement came after a federal judge in Sacramento ruled on a broader question in August and found that the university had violated Title IX, the federal law passed in 1972 that requires equal athletic opportunities for men and women.
U.S. District Judge Frank Damrell rejected the women’s individual discrimination claims but found that the university had reduced athletic opportunities for all women during the time the plaintiffs were enrolled.
Lauren Mancuso, Arezou Mansourian, and Christine Wing-Si Ng sued in 2003 after the university eliminated more than 60 opportunities for women to participate in athletics between the 1998-99 and 2004-05 academic years. Most of the missed opportunities were from the loss of junior varsity teams for women’s water polo and women’s lacrosse.
The three women wrestled competitively in high school and enrolled at Davis, which is just west of Sacramento, with hopes of making the varsity wrestling squad. But the university said they had to compete against men of the same weight class to make the team.
At the time, no four-year California colleges had an all-women’s intercollegiate wrestling team, and Damrell noted that the women either declined to try out for the men’s squad or could not make the cut.
The Title IX violation came in response to the lost opportunities in established women’s sports.
