Champion Women arrives at a time when the need for fearless and focused advocacy for women’s sports is most needed. This need is evident by how our most powerful and influential educational and athletic institutions have fallen short in addressing critical gender equity issues. Champion Women will lead targeted efforts to aggressively advocate for equality, accountability, and transparency by these institutions with an underlying philosophy that sports opportunities are vehicles to improve the lives of girls and women. Something new is coming!
•Too many colleges and universities are out of compliance with the most basic Title IX athletics
requirements, when local constituencies could be empowered to push for more women’s teams.
• Too many colleges, universities and high schools fail to comply with the basic legal requirements
after they are confronted with allegations that their athletes have committed sexual assault or
engaged in sexual harassment, oftentimes creating a hostile environment for the student body.
• Collegiate sports will be restructured in the coming years in response to the legal rulings in
the Northwestern and O’Bannon cases, making advocacy for women’s sports all that more
important.
• Women’s coaches face unfair and discriminatory employment conditions in the world of
collegiate athletics, receiving far less pay than their male counterparts, being locked out of the
men's coaching market (despite male coaches having coaching opportunities in women’s sports)
and overseeing programs with disproportionate less facilities and scholarships than male sports
programs.
• The U.S. Olympic Committee is creating a separate non-government agency to investigate and
sanction sexually abusive coaches, an effort that will fail if the agency does not have
independence and for which strong advocacy for women will be necessary.
For more information visit the website here.
