More Than A Magazine, A Movement
A federal civil rights law enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.
For my daughter Gwen Jorgensen, the benefit of Title IX offered not only a gateway to activities. Gwen’s generation grew up with a belief system—a mindset that young women deserve the same as men.
The impact of Title IX presents a stark generational contrast between my daughter and me. Equal opportunity afforded her the chance to pursue sports in elementary school, high school, college and on the world stage. She grew up believing in herself, her talents and her skills.
Another season of the award-winning Showtime series Yellowjackets compares female empowerment then and now, contrasting girls of the 1990s with the women they are today.
There’s a lot going on in this brilliantly suspenseful show, including some spectacular deconstructions of stereotypes—good and bad—but what really stands out to me are the questions it asks about competition. For this viewer who came of age in the ‘90s—benefiting from a lot of self-empowerment messaging but not much feminism, let alone intersectional feminism—Yellowjackets really hits.
The recent CDC report on the health of U.S. high school students was sharply contextualized by chief medical officer Dr. Deborah Houry’s headline-grabbing remark at the report’s release: “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma.”
Rape culture is defined in part by its tolerance of subjection of women to a continuum of threats. Rape culture is also characterized by sexism, which involves normalized denigration and dismissal of women. Failure to address these conditions for young girls creates more hurdles on their paths to success and the possibility of public leadership—where the ranks of women leaders continue to be proportionally much smaller than they are for men.
To fight for change effectively, we must listen to students and survivors nationwide and provide them with critical information on how campuses handle sexual assault. We built the Campus Accountability Map and Tool (CAMT) to do just that.
There is no “one size fits all” approach to addressing campus sexual assault, but the CAMT centralizes data to shift focus to one that keeps students first in mind and an institution’s bottom line and reputation last.
Seven years ago, two parents whose child was sexually assaulted on a high school field trip created the nonprofit Stop Sexual Assault in Schools (SSAIS) after demanding accountability from the Seattle school district. In the website’s inaugural blog, Fatima Goss Graves, now president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, wrote: “If we do not bring a serious focus to the problem of sexual harassment and assault in elementary and secondary schools, it will be nearly impossible to make real progress at any other level of education.”
In the last decade, when it comes to stopping sexual harassment and assault in elementary and secondary schools, how far have we come?
Most institutions today are failing to support female athletes equally to males in publicity, promotion, recruiting and athletic financial aid. These failures are now significantly compounded by a new form of inequality: payments to student athletes for use of their names, images and likenesses, known as NILs.
In a recent letter sent to the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, The Drake Group requested that the agency issue guidance warning institutions, their conferences and national governance organizations of their obligations under Title IX and how they apply to these new NIL-related activities, and that actions by “collectives” may be attributed to the universities.
The women of the 1979 Oregon State University softball team used Title IX as a tool for institutional change. Decades later, they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve.
“At that time the most successful teams on campus were women’s and we had to fight with the athletic department for everything … I think I just reached my limit and felt like we had an opportunity to try to do something. I wanted justice.”
It’s no surprise that access to abortion and reproductive rights are top of mind for young feminist activists. What’s unique is how these leaders, and others profiled in this year’s The Future is Ms. series, leverage the tools available to them to make change.
Check out our roundup of articles written by teen girl journalists.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in in this biweekly round-up.
This week: Supreme Court cases threaten the future of affirmative action; senators push legislation to protect incarcerated pregnant women and pregnant workers; Social Security Administration will allow transgender people to indicate their correct gender on documents; Hawaii high school discrimination case puts Title IX to the test; Italy swears in its first woman prime minister; 4.6 million Americans are disenfranchised due to felony convictions; and more.
In the five years since it took off like wildfire, the #MeToo campaign has made widespread sexual abuse in the U.S. visible for the first time and inspired a record number of sexual harassment lawsuits against employers. It exposed how our decades-old workplace anti-harassment laws were outdated and often ineffective. In the last five years, 22 states and the District of Columbia passed more than 70 workplace anti-harassment bills in the last five years—many with bipartisan support.
Even still, U.S. rape culture persists and creates an environment where women and girls are disbelieved, survivors are discouraged from reporting abuse, and male abusers are forgiven—or even rewarded—for sexually abusive behavior. Congress must do more.
