Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

by Neena Chaudhry, Senior Counsel
National Women’s Law Center

As Title IX Blog pointed out the other day, a complaint against the West Perry School District in Pennsylvania that the girls’ softball field is inferior to the boys’ baseball field is unfortunately nothing new. It is but one obvious manifestation of the second-class treatment that girls and women today still receive in high school and college athletics programs. 

A report we released last June on the 35th anniversary of Title IX shows just how far we still have to go to fulfill the law’s promise. The report analyzes the athletics complaints filed with, and compliance reviews conducted by, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education (OCR) over the five year period between 2001 and 2006. During that period, 416 athletics complaints were filed with OCR, over 90 percent of which claimed discrimination against females. About 30 percent of the allegations made on behalf of girls challenged schools’ failure to provide enough opportunities for girls and women to play sports, and about 60 percent challenged inequitable treatment of girls’ and women’s teams.

by Mary Robbins, Program Assistant
National Women’s Law Center

The American Association of University Women has launched a blog addressing issues in the categories of education, social justice, Title IX, civil rights, economic security and employment.

by Lisa Codispoti, Senior Advisor
and Brigette Courtot, Policy Analyst
National Women’s Law Center

This post is part of a weekly series on Women and Health Reform.

The stomach flu is making its way through the NWLC Health team — this could be why both of us spent the better part of Monday morning praying to the porcelain goddess. On the other hand, it might have just been a reaction to the President’s budget.

When President Bush released his final budget earlier this week, his proposal for health care funding was so ghastly that many on Capitol Hill pronounced it “dead on arrival”. Why get all worked up about a proposal that is already “dead”? Well, these proposals may be on the road to nowhere (and, frankly, he’s recycled more than a few of them from last year’s budget) but they are leaving a lot of exhaust in their wake. As disturbing as the budget itself is, it’s the ideology lurking behind the proposals that really has us worried — you know, the belief that the healthy and the wealthy should benefit at the expense of the elderly, the sick, and the poor.

The final Bush budget reflects several conservative views about how to address America’s health care crisis, and it demonstrates exactly what is at risk in the debate over how to fix our broken health care system. Let’s start with Medicare and Medicaid: these programs form a critical safety net for nearly 50 million elderly, low-income, and disabled women. Instead of providing funding to adequately support these programs, the President would instead cut a combined total of more than $200 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years.