Women's Only college programs receive legal challenges as sex discrimination - Internet Law Review

Female-only science programs, launched by many universities to redress gender imbalance in such fields as computer science and engineering, are coming under growing legal attack as sex discrimination against men.

The U.S. Department of Education has opened more than two dozen investigations into universities across the nation — UC Berkeley, UCLA and USC as well as Yale, Princeton and Rice — that offer female-only scholarships, awards, professional development workshops and even science and engineering camps for middle and high school girls. Sex discrimination in educational programs is banned under Title IX, a federal law that applies to all schools, both public and private, that receive federal funding.

A new study released found that 84% of about 220 universities offer single-gender scholarships, many of them in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. That practice is permitted under Title IX only if the “overall effect” of scholarships is equitable. The study, by a Maryland-based nonprofit advocating gender equity on college campuses, showed the majority of campus awards lopsidedly benefited women.

In California, for instance, 11 colleges and universities reviewed offered 117 scholarships for women and four for men, according to the survey by Stop Abusive and Violent Environments. The group was originally founded to lobby for due process rights for those accused of campus sexual misconduct, who are overwhelmingly male — and launched the current project challenging single-gender programs in January.

The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction,” said Everett Bartlett, the organization’s president who plans to file federal complaints against about 185 campuses if they don’t sufficiently respond to questions about the scholarship practices. “We’re not a society based on quotas, we’re a society based on fairness,” Bartlett said.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed sweeping changes to Title IX rules that would bolster the rights of the accused in sexual misconduct cases and is expected to issue final rules this fall. The department could not immediately respond to questions about the single-sex investigations.

The professor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared retaliation, said she worked with UC professors to file the complaint to push back against what she described as an erosion of meritocracy and growing favoritism of women in the sciences. As a mentor to college students of all genders, she said, she sees more men becoming discouraged about their chances of success in the field.

In university hiring, a 2015 study by Cornell University found that hypothetical female applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships were favored, 2 to 1, over male counterparts.

“I obviously want women to be able to have opportunities to further their education and have employment in STEM, but I feel everything is being pushed for women,” she said. “For me, Title IX is about being completely fair.”

Erin Buzuvis, a Title IX expert and law professor at Western New England University, said she questioned whether the recent surge in complaints about single-gender programs was motivated by a larger desire to attack Title IX. But she said it was appropriate to review sex-specific programs to see if they’ve become outdated as women have advanced in higher education. She added that attention should also be given to increasing men in such female-dominated fields as nursing and K-12 education.

“We need to be skeptical ... of any segregation projects,” she said, “because the risk of treating people unequally on the basis of sex is promoting stereotypes.”

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