This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 19th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown. You may be surprised to learn that Title IX isn't about college sports, it's about gender equity in higher education but there's not much evidence that it

does much to solve the problems it was created to address. The law is 40 years old

this week. Cato Institutes Neil McCluskey evaluates its job

performance. What problem was Title IX meant to solve?

Title IX was ostensibly supposed to address the problem of gender discrimination in federally funded

education programs. So what that means in practice is really almost

any college university, any college university that takes students who have

federal student aid, that means student loans, grants, anything like that. They are

subject to Title IX. And then all high schools, all middle schools, all grade schools, anybody like that is subject to Title IX as well.

And ultimately the goal broadly is gender equity. Of course, the difficulty is, well, what exactly does that mean?

How do you define it?

How do you enforce it?

How has it been defined and enforced in the United States?

Well, so one of the strange things about Title IX

is, even though the law was never supposed to be

focused on sports and in particular college sports that has become almost the exclusive focus of Title IX, Title IX enforcement.

And the question is why?

Now, I don't know that that's a question we have a definitive answer for, but what seems to be the case is that

sports is something where you can easily put numbers on people who

participate. So you can say, well, X percent of men at colleges participate in sports.

X percent of women participate in sports.

And you say, well, is that disproportionate to the percentage of the total student body that's made of men and women?

...