Gymnastics was one sport available for women long before Title IX. But that doesn’t mean it was free from discrimination. In fact, gymnasts at Brown University brought a precedent-setting lawsuit in 1992, two decades after Title IX became law.
In 1991, Brown University cut women’s varsity gymnastics, along with three other teams. It wasn’t that the program was failing; just the year before, the team had won Brown’s first-ever Ivy League title for gymnastics.
Amy Cohen, the incoming captain of the team, was devastated.
“We begged for another solution; we suggested the athletics director ask all coaches to trim 5 percent from their budgets to spare these four teams,” she says. “He told us in no uncertain terms that he had made the decision and that his decision was final.”*
Who got rid of whom?
The possibility remained of keeping the team at a club level, and the women got to work fundraising. Over the summer, they raised enough money — from the community, not the university! — to continue. In the fall, Amy arrived on campus proud of saving the team and expecting the athletic director to congratulate the women.
Well, that didn’t happen.
“He locked us out of our locker room and informed us that we could not see the athletic trainers, use the varsity weight room or hold home meets on weekends,” she said. “At one point, he even muttered, ‘I thought I got rid of you.’”**
The university had cut the teams — men’s water polo and golf, and women’s gymnastics and volleyball — in response to a mandate to trim $1.6 million from its budget. It claimed it was acting fairly by cutting two women’s and two men’s teams.
Amy saw it differently — women were already underrepresented in sports at Brown, so the cuts disproportionately affected them. At the time, women comprised 53.8 percent of the 5,600 enrolled students, yet they represented just 38 percent of the 900 varsity athletes.
A civil rights warrior
In 1992, Amy became the lead plaintiff in a Title IX lawsuit against the university. The case wound its way through the courts, handing the women victory after victory. In 1997, they finally won in district court, but Brown didn’t give up. It appealed to the Supreme Court.
“The ruling leaves the university no choice but to set aside up to 51 percent of its varsity opportunities for qualified women because 51 percent of its students were women,” said a spokeswoman for the university. “That stark numerical quota was required without regard to the fact that women do not represent 51 percent of all interested athletes.”***
This well-worn argument is sort of a chicken-and-the-egg line of thinking. Women aren’t as interested in sports as men are, one side says. Women would be just as interested in sports if they had as much opportunity as men, the other side says.
When the women won their case in 1997, Amy was no longer a student. Then a second-grade teacher, Amy said her students likened her to civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.
“I think they understand Title IX better than most of the nation’s athletic directors,” she said.****
Fast forward to today
Ultimately, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the ruling stood. The university set in motion a plan to increase minimum team sizes for women’s sports, cap team sizes for men’s sports, restore the four cut teams, and add a women’s lightweight crew team.
That wasn’t the end of the story, though. In May 2020, Brown cut several women’s teams even though male athletes already had a larger share of the school’s athletic resources. The women went back to court and emerged with a settlement requiring the university to reinstate two of the teams and extend enforcement of the decree for several more years.
For Amy, this decades-long battle for equality became bigger than just one team.
“We realized that this case was about much more than just getting our gymnastics team back. We became Title IX warriors,” she said. “Over the past 50 years, progress has been made towards equality and equity in sports but, I am sad to say, we still have a long way to go. I hope that in my lifetime I will see true equity and equality.”*****
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* “Class Action Hall of Fame, Class of 2022: Title IX Champions for Equality in Women’s Sports,” Impact Fund (February 2022). Amy and her teammates were honored by this social justice organization for their activism. https://www.impactfund.org/social-justice-blog/cahof22
** “Class Action,” Impact Fund.
*** “Women gain a victory in access to athletics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (April 22, 1997), p. 5.
**** Susan Ware. Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc., 2007), p. 85.
***** “Class Action,” Impact Fund.
PHOTO: Brown University women’s 1990 gymnastics team. Amy Cohen is in front, above the “O” in the sign. Source: National Museum of American History.