By Jenny Egan
Last week the University of California at Davis (UCD) settled a case with three women wrestlers and agreed to pay $1.35 million. The settlement came after a federal judge found that the University violated Title IX by not providing female students with equal athletic participation opportunities.
The women, Arezou Mansourian, Christine Ng, and Lauren Mancusco, were all competitive high school wrestlers. They were recruited by UCD and went to school there because it touted a strong women’s wrestling program. But shortly after they enrolled, UCD changed the program.
The women wrestlers were no longer allowed to compete against other females, and were forced to compete with men in order to remain on the team.
The three wrestlers brought suit under Title IX, the law that bars discrimination on the basis of sex in education. Their case went all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the National Women’s Law Center wrote a friend of the court brief in that appeal. The Court of Appeals held that, contrary to UCD’s claim, the school did not satisfy “prong two” of Title IX’s three-part participation test because it could not show that it had expanded opportunities for women. The case went back to the district court, where the judge also held that UCD violated Title IX.
The case has helped improve athletic opportunities for women at UCD. Since the suit was filed, UCD has added a women’s golf team and a women’s field hockey team. In a separate but related case, UCD agreed to improve gender parity in its athletic participation numbers. Money from that settlement was used to create a fund to help young women play collegiate sports. That fund has already awarded over $70,000 in grants.
The decision in this case follows a number of good decisions in recent Title IX cases, including lawsuits on behalf of high school athletes in Indiana and San Diego, CA. It takes a brave person to stand up and fight, but these cases make clear that a lot of women and girls are willing to go to the mat for an equal chance to play sports.