She Exposed the Discrimination in College Sports Before Title IX. Now She’s a Women’s History Month Honoree

From TIME authored by Olivia B Waxman:

“With March marking both March Madness and Women’s History Month, it’s a fitting time to look back at how far women’s sports have come since President Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law on June 23, 1972, as part of the Education Amendments of 1972.

But, though many know Title IX best as the law that increased women’s participation in school sports, that result was in some ways a happy accident.

“Sports wasn’t really discussed or considered much at all when Congress was considering the Title IX bill or when it enacted the law,” says Margaret Dunkle, who as a researcher in the 1970s helped bring that result to fruition.

For the work she did, which led to her becoming the first Chair of the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, Dunkle is now one of the trailblazers honored by the National Women’s History Project for exemplifying this year’s Women’s History Month theme of “Nevertheless, She Persisted.” She became Associate Director of the Association of American Colleges’ Project on the Status and Education of Women on the strength of her contributions to a book on sex discrimination in the workplace, but she’d also been drawn to athletics as a civil rights issue. So it was in her role with the project that she helped put together a groundbreaking 1974 report on the state of women’s and men’s sports at U.S. colleges and universities.”

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