jenk | On how Title IX came into being...

U.S. Rep. Edith Green, a Democrat from Oregon, was shocked at what she heard one day in the late 1960s, several years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. A panel of school superintendents spoke at a hearing about a special program for potential high-school dropouts.

One superintendent boasted that his state was having great success with its new program for disadvantaged boys. Many more of them were staying in school. Two other superintendents chimed in that their new classes for boys were a hit as well.

Mrs. Green thought she misunderstood the men. "Do you mean that you had classes only for disadvantaged boys?" she quizzed them. "Yes," they answered.

"Well, was there not a need to have classes for disadvantaged girls?" she asked. She knew for a fact that many girls dropped out of high school, too. "Couldn't you have classes and include both boys and girls?" she wondered.

Oh no, the superintendents said, it was better to have classes just for boys. The boys needed them, they explained, because they "are going to have to be the breadwinners."

Mrs. Green was stunned. Certainly, she thought, the laws of the United States wouldn't let public schools give boys opportunities that they didn't give to girls. But when she looked up the laws in place, she learned that "It was perfectly legal to discriminate in any education program against girls or women."

To Mrs. Green, that was simply unacceptable. The superintendents' comments, she said later, "made me determined that I was going to change the law so that they could no longer discriminate."

Mrs. Green held the first hearings on sex discrimination in education in June and July 1970. Over seven days, distinguished women, scholars and government officials outlined the many ways women were shut out of opportunities:

State universities in Virginia had turned away 21,000 women in the early 1960s; during the same time period, not a single man was turned away.
A brochure from the University of North Carolina declared that admission of women -- but not men -- was "restricted to those who are especially well-qualified." As a result, the 1970 freshman class had nearly 1,900 men and only 426 women.
Quotas at many medical and law schools limited females to just five or ten students out of every one hundred. Consequently, just 7% of the doctors in the U.S. at the end of the 1960s were women.
Even though most teachers from grade school through high school were women, they were rarely promoted. Most principals were men.
[...]
After battles in both the House and Senate, Title IX was included in the law that President Nixon signed on June 23, 1972. Interpreting the law fell to the department then known as Health, Education and Welfare, which moved slowly, in part because it had never before dealt with a sex-discrimination law.

[During the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs excitement] Washington regulators were wrestling with whether this new Title IX required boys and girls to share locker rooms and gym classes, and whether schools now had to offer sports for girls as well as boys. Deciding on separate locker rooms was easy enough, but the crucial call on sports teams ultimately fell to Secretary Weinberger, a political conservative who had long opposed big government and heavy-handed meddling in people's business. [...]

As Mr. Weinberger listened to arguments on both sides of the sports issue in 1973, he found the disparities glaring and unacceptable. Schools provided facilities, coaches, uniforms and locker rooms for boys and men. But if girls and women wanted a team, he said, the attitude was, "Why, go raise money yourself."

To him, it wasn't right that girls had to hold bake sales in order to play, while boys didn't. It wasn't right that an estimated 50,000 men went to college on athletic scholarships, compared with perhaps 50 women. Though it was a controversial call, he concluded that sports teams were school activities covered under Title IX. If boys got to play, then girls should get to play, too.

That single decision would change the course of the new law -- and of American sports. [...]

Once the doors to opportunities were opened, women surged through them. In the early 1980s, the number of women in undergraduate schools passed the number of men and kept growing.

Today, as female matriculation rates have soared, women are also well-represented in certain fields of study -- such as business and biological sciences -- once synonymous with men.
Source: Wall Street Journal (paid registration required)

As for what I think about this, er, um, gee. I was a 3.mumble student in high school; if the sort of quotas this describes had been in place when I applied for college I wouldn't have a Computer Science degree.