The U.S. Department of Education has opened more than two dozen investigations into universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, Yale, Princeton, Rice and more because they offer female-only scholarships, awards, and professional development workshops. But they are not alone. A new analysis claims 84 percent of schools discriminate on awards when it comes to sex.
Like using race-based admissions to penalize some ethnicities and reward others, schools insist they must to so to address imbalance but sex discrimination in educational programs is banned under Title IX, a federal law that applies to all schools, both public and private, that receive federal funding.
If those schools are able to overturn it, it could mean the end of a whole lot of women's sports programs and to recent efforts that have led to female applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships being favored 2 to 1 over male counterparts regardless of qualifications.
The National Women’s Law Center argues discrimination under Title IX is permissible to overcome conditions that resulted in “limited participation” of one gender in a particular educational program, but even female professors worry it is an erosion of meritocracy.
