How Title IX changed women's sports | Carol Hutchins | TEDxUofM

>> I was 7 years old and I came home one day and I said,

"Mom, I know what I want to do.

I want to go to Michigan State

and I want to play football for Duffy Daugherty."

I grew up the fifth of six kids.

We had three boys and three girls.

My mom invented gender equity.

And I was the fifth of six, so I was the risk-taker,

perhaps reckless, and I definitely didn't follow any norms.

And I was not a normal 7-year-old girl.

I wanted to play with my brothers.

I wanted to do everything that they did.

And I wanted to play sports.

And we played every sport there was.

We'd go across the street, play baseball,

we'd go out behind the backyard and play ice hockey,

we'd go in the driveway and play basketball, but my favorite was football.

Football in the backyard with all the boys.

I was part of the neighborhood band of boys.

I did everything with them and I was usually the only girl.

I was usually one of the first ones picked.

But I knew I was different.

I was different from the other girls.

They called me tomboy.

That's apparently what you call girls that like to do boy things.

But honestly, I thought I wanted to be a boy.

I always thought I wanted to be a boy

and then at one point I realized I want to be an athlete.

Well, along came the awkward age of teenager.

The boys no longer invited me to play.

It's not cool to get beat by the girls anymore.

But they had better options.

They got to stay after school and play sports.

Organized sports.

They had coaches, they had uniforms.

Me?

I got to be a cheerleader.

That was the only thing really available.

Now sometimes we got to stay after school,

the gym teachers would organize girls athletic activities.

We didn't have coaches, we didn't have uniforms.

We wore pennies with masking tape for numbers.

And it was cool, it was fun, but it wasn't the same.

And I knew one thing.

What I did was never as important as what the boys did.

Title IX was passed in 1972.

And most people will tell you that's why you girls get to play sports.

That's not wrong, but the purpose of

that legislation was because women were

so underrepresented in higher education.

Women were less than 30% of college campuses.

Women were less than 5% of STEM fields or professional schools.

And if women did go to college, they largely majored in uh nursing,

in education, in library sciences, or in home economics.

Women were really underrepresented as they looked into it in sport.

There were virtually no sports for women at that time.

And sports has always been a valuable part of the educational process.

That's why we had it in education.

So Title IX began to look at some of the what are the opportunities

we can have for women?

Now I did make it to Michigan State.

I didn't make it as a football player,

but I got to play softball and I got to play basketball.

And when we got the call that I was going to go there,

my mom said, "How are we going to pay for this?"

I said, "No, Mom, don't worry.

It'll work out.

I'll get a scholarship."

There were no scholarships for women.

There were none.

There was barely any resources for the women.

Our coaches were all part-time.

They drove us to our games in station wagons all over the Midwest.

We had little access to any resources or facilities.

We practiced and we played in gyms with leaky ceilings and warped floors.

We shared a locker room with the general student population.

During halftime of our basketball games,

women would be walking through to go to their swim classes during our halftime

talk.

And we would look at the men

that we were our counterparts

and we knew we were not

as important as them.

But we were happy.

I was ecstatic because I was an athlete.

The day that worldview changed

or maybe I got hit in the face with life.

We were warming up, we were practicing in the big gym,

in the good gym, in the guys' gym.

We were just getting started

and opened the door

and in walked the opponents for the men for the following day.

And I know we're not on the building schedule.

Our coach immediately came over, "Girls, you got to leave."

And we we resisted.

We had an attitude.

We thought we deserved to stay.

But over walked the coach from the opposing team,

a very famous Hall of Fame coach.

And he got us together, he said, "Girls,

you need to get off the court cuz nobody gives a damn about women's

basketball."

I was no longer just happy.

And just a few years later,

the same group of women filed one of the first ever landmark Title IX

lawsuits against Michigan State.

Michigan State was required to provide equitable opportunities for its women's basketball.

We had to use the law to gain access to equity.

And we learned that the law only works if you use it.

Well, I made my way down to Ann Arbor.

I came here to be the assistant softball coach for $3,000 for the year.

My mom said, "I thought you were going to get a real job."

Oh, Mom, don't worry.

It'll work out.

Two years later, I became the head coach.

And the first thing they said to me was,

"There are three sports here at Michigan that you need to be aware of."

Code for stay out of their way.

Football, winter conditioning, and spring football.

They didn't hand me an appointment sheet, not a contract,

and the appointment said 10 month.

That means you get paid for 10 months of the year.

>> >> It also said 50% athletics, 50% clerk typist.

I was a secretary for the athletic department for the first kind of blanks

out,

the first several years of my career.

It was an uphill battle every day in those years.

I used to run from my secretary desk over to the field,

uh pull the weeds or rake the dirt,

get us ready for practices or games.

I'd look across at baseball

and I'd see them out on their field with full-time coaches

and practice gear,

laundry services, and a grounds crew.

And I knew we weren't as important.

We were still driving our student athletes to games in cars

and vans with the coaches driving.

We still had very few scholarships, very limited resources, and in fact,

our own student athletes had to raise money to supplement our budgets.

Our softball players worked at the football games

and they cleaned Crisler Arena to make money

so we could pay for some of our travel.

It was an uphill battle.

But this was consistent across the landscape of college athletics at this time

and actually all athletics,

high school and so forth.

It was a difficult time because we were not being well received.

It was reluctant at best.

Our own athletic director lobbied Congress against Title IX.

He said it would ruin women's sports or men's sports.

And across the landscape,

we saw programs all over the country cutting back on their men's Olympic sports

and cutting sometimes cutting them all together to make room for the emerging women's

sports.

It was a difficult time.

And the men were mad.

They were mad at the women.

And we never wanted to take anybody's opportunity.

We just wanted the same opportunity.

Today, 54 years post Title IX, we are now 53% of this campus population.

We're 48% of the athletic department.

We're doctors, we're lawyers, we're engineers.

We're astronauts, we're Supreme Court justices.

We're leaders.

And over 90% of women who've gone on to be CEOs

or C-suite leaders played competitive sport at some time.

And the skill sets

that have so long been attributed to being on a team

or being an athlete,

like persistence, perseverance, resilience, overcoming adversity, and most importantly, confidence,

those skill sets that for so long were good for our young men,

nobody ever said, "Wow, this is so great for the boys.

We should do it for the girls."

Title IX gave us these opportunities.

The law gave us these opportunities.

I'm assuming many of you have heard of Caitlin Clark.

Caitlin is the NCAA basketball career scoring leader, male or female.

She's arguably the greatest women's player ever.

Maybe she's just the greatest player ever.

But Caitlin did not become the scoring icon

that she is because she's

so good at basketball.

I did not become the winningest coach because I'm so good at coaching.

Achievement is a result of opportunity.

There is no success without opportunity, and Title IX gave us the opportunity.

It opened the door,

and we did not wait for permission to walk through it.

Prior to '72, one in approximately 27 girls played sport.

Today, it is cool.

It is cool to be a woman and be an athlete.

It is popular.

It's accepted.

Nobody's calling us tomboy anymore.

They usually call us badasses.

And for so many years, of these 50-plus years,

women's sports was under-invested in and really untended to,

but we found a way to flourish

and to grow and to become what

so many of you have had the opportunity to be involved in.

And we are continuing that.

The women's NCAA basketball tournament just a couple of years ago was awarded the

right to use the trademark logo,

Final Four.

That trademark was reserved only for the men for years.

The men's NCAA basketball tournament, it's worth billions of dollars,

for decades has rewarded the member institutions who participate in that tournament with money.

Money's back to the institution.

It paid to be good in men's basketball.

Just in the past year, women have been awarded the same opportunities.

And it's helped.

It's helped to incentivize athletic departments to continue to support.

But women's sports are officially booming,

and you can just look no further than the women's pro leagues, the WNBA,

the NWSL, the new Love Volleyball League.

They have all shown great interest.

They're showing they can generate revenue.

Big investors, names like Alexis Ohanian, Magic Johnson, Tom Brady,

and Patrick Mahomes have all invested in these leagues.

ESPN just announced last week Women's Sports Sunday,

a new program dedicated to following women's sports.

Our TV ratings have exploded.

Both the women's college world series

and the women's Final Four have outrated the men's version in recent years.

We are visible.

We are viable.

We are filling arenas, and we're filling stadiums.

And today, somebody gives a damn.

We got here because of opportunity.

We got here because we didn't wait for permission.

And we have proven.

We have proven that we can play.

We've proven that there's interest.

We've proven that TV loves us.

And we've proven that we belong.

And we belong on the court.

We belong in court.

We belong at the table, and we belong at the same table.

In 2005, when Michigan softball became the first team east of the Mississippi to

win the women's College World Series in front of millions of TV viewers,

my mom said, "You know, this has really worked out."

Women's sports are going to work out.

Thank you.

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