Laura Dunn
Title IX has remained a mainstay in higher ed for 50 years but has evolved from courts interpreting it to cover sexual harassment and sexual violence to changes made by the Obama and Trump administrations as to what is required of schools under the law to protect students from sexual misconduct.
“We’ve made some great progress,” says Kimberly J. Robinson, Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. “And we still have a ways to travel to get to equality under Title IX. We’ve made great progress in the sense that we came from a time where girls and women were either shut out of education or really discouraged from pursuing a variety of fields and were encouraged to pursue homemaking or something such as ... administrative assistants.”
There remain important strides to make in many areas, according to Robinson.
“One is women in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics],” explains Robinson. “Women are still significantly underrepresented in careers in STEM and are underrepresented at that educational level, too, in colleges and graduate programs.”
Pew Research Center research from 2021 showed that, among those ages 25 and older, women are now more likely than men to have a four-year college degree — 39% of women and 37% of men in 2021 compared to 8% of women and 14% of men in the 1970s.
“The original purpose of Title IX was to eliminate barriers to education for women and girls, and that was remarkably successful,” says Dr. R. Shep Melnick, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and author of The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education.
