This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 25th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

When we think Title IX, we think sports, but academia is now facing more directly the challenge posed by those gender equity rules.

Next stop for this concept of parity between men and women, the sciences.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom,

and author of the book Feds in the Classroom offers his thoughts.

Title IX is a provision that was originally put into law in 1972, and it was called the education

amendments of 1972.

And basically what it's supposed to do is ensure that women have equal access to all opportunities in schools.

Mainly it focuses on higher ed but it applies to K-12,

but any schools that receive federal funds.

If the issue is equality of opportunity,

there would still seem to be some natural inclination

that has to exist between men and women and where they would prefer to

apply their brains.

Well, and there's the rub, as they say.

This has been the problem with Title IX enforcement really from day one.

It started with sports where they've said well if you don't have a proportionate number

or percentage of women involved in sports or having the opportunity to play college

sports at the same level as men it's unfair and it was only a few years ago that the

Department of Education floated this idea that maybe the way we should determine whether Title IX is being applied correctly is we require schools to survey all their students and they provide sports based on survey results of

whether or not women actually want this. Strangely there was a big outcry

against that by a lot of women's groups saying well that's not fair

...