Thank you, Birch Bayh. An entire nation of women is forever grateful.
Among the many accomplishments of the longtime Indiana senator, who died Thursday at 91, was Title IX, the law prohibiting gender discrimination in education. Though initially intended to open up graduate schools to women, Title IX also opened the playing fields.
In doing so, it changed the way American women saw themselves. And how society sees us.
Playing sports made us confident and bold. Playing sports taught us how to be leaders and showed us that being assertive was a good thing. Playing sports taught us to be proud of our bodies and respect them, and to ignore those who didn’t.
Birch Bayh is applauded by Valerie Jarret, Senior Adviser President Obama, and tennis great Billie Jean King, right, during a 40th anniversary celebration of Title IX in 2012. (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP)
Almost 50 years after its passage, we are not only better as women for Bayh’s Title IX, we’re better as a country.
“The participation, what a huge sea change,” Donna Lopiano, who worked with Bayh, Edith Green and Patsy Mink on the passage of Title IX, told USA TODAY Sports. “The magnitude of that change is underestimated by the general public.”
In 1972, fewer than 300,000 high school girls played sports, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Two years after Title IX, that number had soared to 1.3 million. Last year, 3.4 million high school girls played sports, according to NFSH.
The number of women playing sports in college has gone from less than 32,000 before Title IX to almost 219,000 last year. Women made up the majority of the U.S. teams at the Rio and London Olympics, and crushed the gold medal count at both.
We now have professional leagues in women's soccer and women's basketball. Serena Williams ranks as one of the most popular and influential athletes in the world.
The significance?
Multiple studies have shown that girls and women who play sports are healthier, do better in school and have higher graduation rates. They are also less likely to do drugs or be sexually active as teenagers.
When ESPNW and Ernst & Young surveyed 400 female corporate executives in 2015, 94 percent of the women said they had played sports. The report also found that wages of women who’d played sports were 7 percent higher than women who didn’t.
“Sport is where we taught guys how to play as a team in corporate America. There was never any separation between being on a sports team and corporate America. That was all the training they needed,” Lopiano said.
“I’m always grateful that, of all the cultural institutions to break down, the first was sports,” added Lopiano, who was women’s athletic director at Texas from 1975 to 1992 and CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation from 1992 to 2007.
“… (Because) it wasn’t about sports. It was about everything that was required to access and wield power.”
That wasn’t Bayh’s focus when he joined Green and Mink in co-authoring and sponsoring Title IX. His first wife, Marvella, had once been rejected by the University of Virginia, and Bayh was still incensed by it.
But when coaches, schools and athletic institutions tried to exempt athletics – football and men’s basketball, in particular – from Title IX compliance, Bayh pushed back.
Hard.
Rather than allowing court rulings to shape how Title IX would be implemented, Lopiano said Bayh, Green and Mink worked with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to create a framework for the one-paragraph law. It’s those directives, most of which related to athletics, that helped Title IX withstand legal challenges over the years, Lopiano said.
“If you give somebody credit, on a scale of 1 to 10, he got 12,” Lopiano said. “It was huge.”
There is still work to be done, of course. Just last week, the U.S. women's soccer team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against U.S. Soccer. More women attend college than men, yet women make up less than 50 percent of college athletes.
But girls growing up today cannot fathom a life without sports, cannot relate to being told they have to accept "less than" status. Title IX guaranteed them access to sports and the lessons that shape every part of our lives, ones that have enriched our society as much as each individual girl who takes the field, court or pool.
To be equal players in society, we first had to get on the playing field.
And for that, we have Birch Bayh to thank.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.
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