Donald Trump has loudly portrayed himself as the protector of female athletes. So why is his administration preventing them from getting paid as much as their male counterparts?
The Department of Education announced recently that Title IX, the federal law that requires colleges to provide equal per-player funding for men’s and women’s sports, does not apply to name, image, and likeness payments paid directly to athletes from colleges and universities. That policy, which reverses a position adopted by the Biden administration, will cut collegiate women athletes off from a huge new source of funding set to come into play this year: Next month, a federal judge is expected to approve a $2.8 billion class-action settlement that, after years of litigation, will finally allow athletes to be receive name, image, and likeness payments from their school rather than through outside NIL collectives, the college-sports version of a super PAC.
The schools that choose to opt in to the settlement are expected to have a salary cap of up to $20.5 million each to distribute to players. Under the guidance released during the final days of the Biden administration, they would have had to distribute that money between male and female athletes in proportion to their participation rates. Now, under Trump, that money is all but guaranteed to flow overwhelmingly to male athletes, mostly football and basketball players. For example, the University of Georgia plans to give 75 percent of its revenue-sharing to the football team, 15 percent to men’s basketball, 5 percent to women’s basketball, and the remaining 5 percent to all other sports. Other big-time sports schools are expected to follow a similar formula.
“Without a credible legal justification, the Biden Administration claimed that NIL agreements between schools and student athletes are akin to financial aid and must, therefore, be proportionately distributed between male and female athletes under Title IX,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, said in a statement. “The claim that Title IX forces schools and colleges to distribute student-athlete revenues proportionately based on gender equity considerations is sweeping and would require clear legal authority to support it.”
Indeed, to Trump, “protecting women’s sports” begins and ends with one idea: barring transgender women from competing. During his presidential campaign, Trump courted NFL- and college-football fans with a blitz of ads attacking Kamala Harris for her positions on trans rights. Shortly after taking office, he followed through on his campaign promises by signing an executive order banning trans women and girls from competing in sports. The White House touted the order as “ensuring equal opportunities for women in sports.”
In reality, the order looks like a classic Trump blend of maximum culture-war posturing for minimum tangible benefit. NCAA President Charlie Baker testified before Congress in December that out of the 510,000 athletes competing in college sports, fewer than 10 were trans. (Baker did not indicate whether they were men or women.) Even at the youth-sports level, experts estimate that the number of trans athletes is fewer than 100 nationwide.
By comparison, the Trump administration’s recent NIL guidance could affect thousands of college women, deepening an already glaring disparity. With some exceptions—such as the Louisiana State University gymnast Olivia Dunne, a social-media sensation who makes an estimated $4 million a year—female college athletes have had a difficult time keeping pace with their male counterparts in the new era of NIL money. NIL collectives are typically financed by wealthy boosters and donors who care primarily about men’s basketball and football. Even though the economic value of women’s sports has grown dramatically in recent years, women still don’t get the same attention or brand opportunities as men. Women’s sports still receive only about 15 percent of total sports-media coverage.
Women are concerned that they won’t have much of a voice as revenues in their sports grow. In January, a group of more than 100 female Division I athletes sent letters to the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference commissioners requesting a meeting and expressing their concerns about a variety of issues, most notably the disparity in NIL money between male and female athletes. So far, the commissioners have not agreed to a meeting.
“My first impression is that Title IX is being used to an extent to feed the culture and political ideological differences in our country,” Ajhanai Keaton, an assistant sports-management professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management, told me. “If it is an educational enterprise, there shouldn’t be any question that money should be split evenly between the genders in sports.”
Some would argue that women being unable to keep pace with men in NIL money is just the free market at work, given the indisputable popularity of football and men’s basketball. On its face, a school like Georgia giving the majority of its revenue-sharing to the football team makes sense, because football accounted for about three-quarters of the Bulldogs’ $203 million in revenue last year, the fifth-most among major college football programs. But the tendency of the free market to reinforce existing inequalities is exactly why laws like Title IX exist.
Even before the rise of NIL money, college sports were failing to live up to the law’s mandate. According to a report released by the Government Accountability Office last year, women account for 56 percent of undergraduates but only 42 percent of student athletes. And in 2022, a USA Today report on Division I sports concluded that for every $1 schools spent on travel, equipment, and recruiting for men’s teams, they spent just 71 cents on women’s teams.
In the pandemic season of 2021, men’s and women’s basketball players played their March Madness tournament in separate, isolated “bubbles.” The men’s players were given an enormous, well-stocked gym befitting top athletes, while the women were given only a few yoga mats and a tiny rack for dumbbells. After the obvious disparities were blasted on social media, the NCAA commissioned an outside firm to conduct a gender-equity review. The unfairness turned out to extend to the meal plan. “The portions originally were very small,” an unnamed women’s coach said in the report. “I didn’t ask the men’s team about the food. I saw a buffet on Twitter … I would love to be in a buffet situation.”
The NCAA apologized for the weight-room disparity, but the clear takeaway was that even though the broadcast rights for women’s basketball bring in an estimated $65 million a year, the organization still willingly chose to provide substandard resources for female athletes.
When Trump signed his executive order on transgender athletes, he made sure to pack the East Room of the White House with young girls. It made for a good photo op. But the administration’s actual policy agenda will mean fewer opportunities for those girls, not more. If all of this is Trump’s idea of protecting women, then it’s fair to say that female athletes are officially on their own.
The post Trump Has a Funny Way of Protecting Women’s Sports appeared first on The Atlantic.
