While opportunities for girls to participate in high school sports increased during the 1990s, progress toward gender equity slowed and, perhaps, even reversed direction during the 2000s, according to a new report.

The report, released today by the Sport, Health and Activity Research and Policy Center for Women and Girls (SHARP)—a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Women’s Sports Foundation—provides insight into the state of high school athletics and the inequalities in the U.S. public school system, despite the passing of the landmark legislation, Title IX, 40 years ago.

“The Decade of Decline: Gender Equity in High School Sports,” co-authored by SHARP director Don Sabo and U-M postdoctoral fellow Philip Veliz, analyzes data from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Data Collection on girls’ and boys’ high school athletic opportunities between the 1999-2000 and 2009-10 school years.

Key findings from the report include:

• Athletic participation opportunities expanded across the decade, but boys’ allotment grew more than girls. By 2009-10, 53 athletic opportunities were offered for every 100 boys, compared with 41 opportunities for every 100 girls.
• Despite the level of economic resources, the opportunity gap between girls and boys continued to increase. By 2010, girls participated in greater numbers than in the beginning of the decade, but their share of total athletic opportunities decreased across the decade compared to boys. During a decade of expanding athletic participation opportunities across U.S. high schools, boys received more opportunities than girls, and boys’ opportunities grew faster than those of girls.
• By 2009-10, boys still received disproportionately more athletic opportunities than girls in all community settings—urban, suburban, towns and rural communities.
• In 2000, 8.2 percent of schools offered no sports programs, the percentage nearly doubled by 2010, rising to approximately 15 percent. Additionally, schools with disproportionately higher female enrollments (i.e., the student body is 56 percent female or higher) were more likely to have dropped interscholastic sports between 2000 and 2010.
• Seven percent of public schools lost sports programs between 2000 and 2010, while less than 1 percent added sports to their curriculum. Given this trend in the data, it is estimated that by the year 2020, 27 percent of U.S. public high schools (4,398 schools) would be without any interscholastic sports, translating to an estimated 3.4 million young Americans (1,658,046 girls and 1,798,782 boys) who would not have any school-based sports activities to participate in by 2020, if the trend continues.

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