From NBC Sports [1]:
She didn't know the term because her own parents weren't even born when Indiana senator Birch Bayh introduced Title IX to Congress in 1972, but she provided a spontaneously perfect example of that legislation's impact ... and its continued importance.
Sports weren't mentioned in Title IX's tidy 37 words, but its promise that women wouldn't be "excluded from participation in (…) any education program or activity" allowed us to start leaving our collective footprints on playing fields and parquet floors and rubberized oval tracks.
Since the legislation was enacted on June 23, 1972, women's participation in sports has grown roughly a bazillion percent (I'm not very good at math) from 294,015 high school athletes in 1972 to 3,057,266 in 2008, while at the college level, the numbers have increased from 29,972 in 1972 to 186,460 in 2010.
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