POLITICO (“The college sports dispute fracturing conservatives“):

The coalition that built a motto around “protect women’s sports” is splintering as some conservatives argue that a decades-old policy boosting female athletes is a threat to men.

Republicans found years of political success uniting against transgender athletes, a push that helped them energize voters in a range of elections and divide Democrats. But the movement is now fraying after two influential conservative organizations, including The Heritage Foundation, started openly attacking bedrock anti-sex discrimination policy that’s fueled women’s sports for decades.

A recent paper published by Heritage argues that longstanding sports policy tied to Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination, is “a failed experiment.” The policy was built on the mistaken assumption that women are just as interested in competitive sports as men and has evolved into a tool of “feminist social engineering,” the paper adds, factors that are leading to cuts in men’s sports like wrestling, gymnastics and tennis.

These arguments land as both parties position themselves to appeal to disaffected young men and conservative groups press Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take sides.

They’ve also outraged conservative women leaders who say the new effort could damage a movement that’s resonated in red states and with PresidentDonald Trump. Those who cited the law in their push to keep transgender athletes out of women’s sports say they didn’t sign up to start culling athletic opportunities for women and girls.

“We have worked so hard to protect women’s sports that at this point we’re not getting on board with anything that wants to dismantle it in any way,” said Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel at the Independent Women’s Law Center. The conservative women’s group has played a key role in giving a platform to female athletes like Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who became a leading figure of the movement after competing against a transgender athlete.

“We still need equal opportunity for women. Period,” Parlato said. “That’s what we’re fighting for. We can’t go backwards.”

The dispute centers on a decades-old interpretation of Title IX that has clarified how the federal law applies to athletics since 1979. Specifically, conservative groups are sparring over the proportionality test, one of three ways schools can demonstrate that male and female students receive equal athletic opportunities. Under the standard, athletic participation rates should roughly match a school’s male-female enrollment ratio.

Supporters of the policy say it has been one of the most important drivers behind the expansion of women’s sports after Title IX became law in 1972. It has helped girls’ participation in high school sports grow from less than 300,000 athletes to roughly 3.5 million over the past four decades. More than 242,300 female athletes also competed in the NCAA across divisions in the 2024-25 school year — a record high.

But some critics argue that women aren’t as interested in sports as men and that the policy pressures schools to eliminate men’s teams while women’s college enrollment, which has outpaced men’s for decades, and sports opportunities continue to grow.

“College athletics has become something that is a quota system, not something that’s responding to interest levels,” said Jonathan Butcher, acting director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. “And taking things away from males in athletics is not doing anything to help females in athletics.”

[…]

Caleb Trotter, senior attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, the other conservative group pushing for changing the policy, said that the proportionality test has outlived its purpose and that eliminating it won’t trigger a return to “a massive disparity in opportunities between males and females because society has changed.”

“At some point, there has to be an end point for using a discriminatory measure, and I think we’re there now and we have been for a while,” Trotter said. “I don’t think the fears of going back to the dark ages of female sports are accurate.”

Trotter’s organization has filed a petition asking the Education Department to rescind the Title IX guidance. The organization argues the test has contributed to increases in women’s teams and — except for football or basketball — cuts to men’s sports teams.

Leaving aside the cudgel of trans women participating in women’s sports, which is a contentious but different topic, it’s likely time to revisit the proportionality test. Not so much because men are more interested in sports than women—which, indeed, could just as easily be an argument in favor of continuing the rule—but because of the distortions created by the revenue sports, especially football.

Focusing the discussion solely on the Power Four collegiate level, football rosters are capped at 105 players. This is a function of large numbers of starters (11 each on offense and defense, plus several “special teams” specialists), high rates of injuries, and a longer developmental pipeline. No other sport comes close.

Aside from football and men’s basketball, sports tend to be an expense rather than a revenue stream. Indeed, most schools actually lose money on football and basketball, treating them as essentially advertising.

If schools with football teams—which, aside from the occasional kicker, are all men— must have the same number of women athletes, they almost by definition must have women’s teams in sports where they don’t field men’s teams. And, as the cost of fielding football teams goes up with the new pay-for-play system (and non-regional conferences that make modest sense for football but radically increase travel costs for other sports), the incentives to cut niche sports increase, anyway.

The obvious compromise, then, is to simply exempt football from the equation. Doing that, I expect, would solve most of the problem. My hunch is that more women are interested in gymnastics and equestrian and more men in ice hockey and wrestling. But the overall numbers would likely balance themselves organically without football skewing the baseline.