Inside Higher Ed reports that women’s sports teams on college campuses are losing ground. A biennial gender equity report released yesterday (“without fanfare”) by the National Collegiate Athletic Association finds that colleges that play Division I sports directed a smaller proportion of athletics spending to women’s teams in 2005-6 than they did in 2003-4.  And we thought Title IX was, um, safe?

Here are the stats:

• In the 2003-4 academic year, when the NCAA last surveyed its members, Division I sports programs spent an average of $7,285,500 on men’s sports and $4,194,800 on women’s sports, for a 16 percentage point differential (63 to 37 percent).
• In 2005-6, the year examined in the survey released Thursday, that split had widened to 22 percentage points, 66 percent to 34 percent ($8,653,600 for men’s sports vs. $4,447,900 for women’s teams).

Football and men’s basketball are responsible for most of the diverging fortunes of men’s and women’s sports programs. The average Division I college spent $7,095,000 of the $8,653,600 it laid out on men’s teams on those two sports.

Donna A. Lopiano, former head of the Women’s Sports Foundation and now president of the consulting firm Sports Management Resources, attributes the decline in support for women’s sports to the slowdown in the growth of participation of female athletes in high school and college and–guess what–a tightening economy.

Says Lopiano, “Add in the continued arms race in men’s football and basketball, in particular the academic support building arms race and assistant coach salaries,” and it’s inevitable that athletics departments will have trouble finding enough money to go around.

Lopiano also added that the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has largely stopped enforcing Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded schools.

For more on what’s currently going on around Title IX, do check out this blog we recently added to the blogroll, called Title IX Blog, which is also where I found the eerie yet entirely a propos image accompanying this post.