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PLANK 8
EDUCATION
The President should direct the vigorous and expeditious enforcement of all laws prohibiting
discrimination at all levels of education and oppose any amendments or revisions that would weaken these
laws and regulations.
Enforcement should apply to elementary, primary, secondary, post-secondary, graduate, vocational and
technical schools, including sports and other programs, and granting of scholarships and fellowships.
Federal surveys of elementary and secondary schools should gather data needed to indicate compliance with
Federal antidiscrimination laws, and these data should be collected by sex as well as race or ethnicity.
The Civil Rights Commission should conduct a study to evaluate the enforcement of laws prohibiting sex
discrimination in physical education and athletics and to consider the usefulness and feasibility of per
capita expenditure in physical education and athletics as a measure of equal opportunity.
Leadership programs for working women in postsecondary schools should be upgraded and expanded, and
private foundations are urged to give special attention to research on women in unions.
Bilingual vocational training, educational and cultural programs should be extended and significantly
expanded, with particular attention to the needs of Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans,
and other minority women.
State school systems should move against sex and race stereotyping through appropriate action,
including:
Review of books and curriculum.
The integration into the curriculum of programs of study that restore to women their history and
their achievements and give them the knowledge and methods to reinterpret their life experiences.
Pre-service and in-service training of teachers and administrators.
Nonsexist and nonracist counseling at every level of education, with encouragement of women to
increase their range of options and choices to include
Background:
"In classrooms, textbooks, and gymnasiums,
women have been taught to undervalue themselves."
Women have always played a major role in the education of the young as part of their childrearing
responsibilities. When an expanding and industrializing nation needed to educate large numbers of children
during the 19th century. Catharine Beecher proclaimed in lectures, pamphlets, and books that women are
ideally suited to the task. It was part of her lifelong campaign to "professionalize" the work that women
had been doing at home, and its effects are still being felt to this day. Women became teachers in
overwhelming numbers, but because it was "women's work," especially in the lower grades, the pay remained
low well into this century.
Then education became big business, supported by Government money, and the better paying, policy-making
jobs went to men, even in the elementary schools that women had been running themselves. In the colleges
and universities, men remained in charge, as they had always been, despite the rising number of women
going into higher education.
According to the Digest of Educational Statistics, women were 45 percent of college undergraduates
in fall, 1975 and 46 percent of graduate students. In 1976, women accounted for 52 percent of college
students ages 14 to 34.
The effects of an educational system that discriminates against women have not only damaged those who have
pursued teaching as a profession but have also been devastation for many women. An educational system run
by men has denied women the opportunity to develop their talents and abilities. In textbooks, classrooms,
and gymnasiums, women have been taught to undervalue themselves. At every level, they have been offered
more limited options than men; they have been denied the training that would enable them to enter higher
paying, more rewarding fields of work.
This discrimination continues, even though it is now illegal under Title 9 of the Education Amendments Act
of 1972. Despite affirmative action programs, recent statistics show only slight progress for women in
some areas. Women who work in education continue to lag behind men in pay and promotions. Women as
students are still being prevented from making full use of their capabilities.
Salaries and promotions The top positions in most schools are held by men, even
when the faculty is predominantly female.
The National Institute of Education reported that in 1975, 63 percent of elementary and secondary teachers
were women. Yet women were principals in less than
two percent of the high schools and in only 18 percent of the primary schools. Out of 16,000 school
districts in the country, only 75 were administered by women. These figures represent a serious setback
for women. In 1928, only eight years after women won the right to vote, 55 percent of primary school
principals were women.
p. 35
The figures in higher education are not any better. The salaries of male professors averaged $3,000 more
than female professors' in 1975-76, and the gap was greater than a year earlier. Between 1974 and 1975,
the percentage of women declined in the highest ranks of professor and associate professors. And,
according to the American Association of University Professors, the number of women faculty actually fell
from 22.5 percent in 1974-75 to 21.7 percent in 1975-76.
Limited options With so few women in leadership positions, it is not surprising
that women students are often inadequately prepared for the world of work. During their lifetime,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 90 percent of the girls and young women now in school
will work outside their homes.
Vocational education does not prepare them for gainful employment. In 1976, 38.7 percent of the girls
enrolled in vocational programs were studying homemaking skills and not skills related to earning wages,
according to Department of Health, Education and Welfare statistics. Of the rest, 27.4 percent were being
taught office skills, such as typing and filing, which would prepare them only for work in the low-paid
female ghetto. Only 4.9 percent of the female vocational students were in trade and industrial programs
that lead to higher paying jobs, compared with about 60 percent of the male vocational students.
Women have been discouraged from learning the skills that would prepare them for highly paid technical
work. According to recent surveys by the Endicott Report and the College Placement Council, future
employment prospects are brightest in many of the fields that use quantitative skills—fields such as
engineering, accounting, banking, and insurance.
Women have been conditioned to believe that they do not have the skills for these jobs. A study by the
National Assessment of Educational Progress found that boys and girls perform almost equally on
mathematics and verbal tests as late as nine years old. As they grow older, however, girls' verbal scores
rise and their math scores decline in comparison to boys' scores. A study of college students entering the
University of California at Berkeley in 1973 showed that only eight percent of the women had four years of
high school mathematics, compared with 57 percent of the men. This meant that 92 percent of incoming women
students could major in only five out of the 20 available fields. (The figures were quoted in testimony
before the congressional hearings on equal opportunity in education.)
It is not surprising, then, that women are underrepresented in technical and scientific fields. According
to the 1975 Endicott Report, five to six percent of scientists and engineers, less than 10 percent of
medical doctors, and less than one percent of mathematicians and physicists are women. Although almost as
many women as men are now in graduate school, the percentage of scientific doctoral degrees awarded to
women today is essentially the same as it was in the 1920's, according to the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. Women earn 45 percent of all bachelor degrees and 44 percent of master degrees,
but in mostly "female" fields.
In 1975, some law schools were still admitting fewer than 20 percent women students, and in 1976-77, women
were only 25 percent of the entering classes in medical schools.
Textbooks The message of many textbooks and storybooks is that girls and women
take second place to men and that they must accept certain roles. Women appear in only 31 percent of all
textbook illustrations, according to a 1974 report for the National Foundation for the Improvement of
Education. Men occupy at least 150 roles in texts, while most women occupy traditional female-roles like
housewife, teacher, and secretary. In primary school materials, boys are pictured as active; girls as
passive. Boys are shown outdoors; girls indoors. Boys perform adventurous and skillful tasks; girls groom
themselves and tend to their homes. Girls are affectionate and nurture dolls and pets; boys are brave and
fierce. These stereotypes are limiting to girls and boys equally.
Stereotyping does not stop in the elementary schools. A study completed in 1974 by a Citizens Advisory on
Sex Inequality in Lexington, Massachusetts found that in a widely used algebra text for grades 8 through
10, boys are shown working, earning high grades, painting, pushing mowers; girls are shown spending money
and dieting. In high school civics books studied by Jennifer MacLeod and Sandy Silverman, there are 1,104
listings for men; 33 for women.
Women are invisible in history books, according to Janice Law Trecker, whose study was published by the
National Council for Social Studies. She found that topics uniquely concerned women, such as women's
suffrage, are given short shrift. Birth control is usually omitted entirely. One text devotes five pages
to the story of the six-shooter, five lines to the life of a frontier woman.
Counseling reinforces the images about a "woman's place." In a 1975 study for HEW, Janice Bick cites
scores in on of the most popular aptitude tests:
"Many young women do not appear to have strong vocational interests and they may score high in certain
‘premarital’ occupations; elementary-school teacher, office worker,
stenographer-secretary."
p. 36
Too many guidance counselors do not take a young woman's career aspirations seriously and try to steer her
into low-paying, conventional career choices.
One well-qualified high school senior wrote to HEW that she was discouraged by her counselor from pursuing
a career as a veterinarian. "She said," wrote the student, "that at our age it's the maternal instinct,
and after a few years of college, we outgrow it."
Women in sports Title 9 regulations specifically call for equal athletic
opportunities for girls and women—and athletics is the single largest category of complaints filed
by students under Title 9, reports NOW's project PEER, which monitored HEW enforcement.
Desegregation of school sports has received so much publicity and controversy that it seems as if the
battle is won. Far from it. Although girls' participation in varsity high school athletic programs shot up
560 percent between 1971 and 1976, boys still take part in team sports more than twice as often as girls,
and not one State offers girls as many varsity teams as boys.
Colleges may be even further behind. In a 1974 study of intercollegiate athletics, it was estimated that
the average budget of women's athletic departments was only two percent of the budgets for men's
athletics.
In 1976, a high school student in Mannington, West Virginia was told by her principal to "watch the boys"
if she liked sports.
Enforcing Title 9 Although Title 9 has been in law since 1972, little has been
done to enforce it. Nearly 900 complaints of discrimination on elementary and secondary levels were made
to HEW, but only 179 of those were investigated and resolved, reported the Project on Equal Education
Rights (PEER), which conducted a year-long study for NOW (National Organization for Women) Legal Defense
and Education Fund.
Under its enforcement powers, HEW has done little else but work on these few complaints, PEER charged, and
worked on them very slowly. It has not taken the necessary steps to inform the public—parents and
students—what their rights are under Title 9. It contacted all schools initially to tell them about
the law, but it has not published its rulings. "Other government agencies have long recognized that most
rulings have universal regulation," notes PEER's report. "Solve the problem of the tennis coach in
Tallahassee and you have resolved matters in Terre Haute, Fall River and Dubuque. If the word
reaches them."
HEW has responsibility under the law to initiate checks in all schools to make sure that opportunities are
available equally to girls and boys, women and men. HEW completed checks in only 12 of the country's
17,000 school districts, PEER reports. It has not issued clear and consistent rulings on a number of
issues that have been brought to
the department; it has changed rulings when they became controversial, and for 10 months, between August
1976 and June 1977, there was a virtual moratorium—HEW stopped making decisions on Title 9 almost
completely. The moratorium has been lifted, and some of this backlog has been cleared up, but in October
1977, the agency released its enforcement plan for the following year and promised to investigate only 21
(seven percent) of the complaints the office expects to receive during the year.
"Hundreds of people have written HEW for help under Title 9," says Holly Knox, director of PEER. "They
couldn't get into classes or couldn't get jobs; there were denied equal pay because of their sex. HEW
turned its back on most of them. Citizens who had every right to expect government help were either
ignored or offered relief when it no longer mattered." HEW has claimed that limited resources in the
Office of Civil Rights restrict the priority enforcement of Title 9, yet the PEER report shows that an
average of just six complaints a year was given to each investigator assigned to cases involving the
public schools.
In four years, PEER reports, with nearly 900 complaints, over 100 staff people in 10 regional offices
devoted at least part-time to Title 9, and a small army of staff in Washington, very little has been
accomplished. The following are the only accomplishments documented in the Government's own files:
Out of 16,000 school districts:
Only 18 agreed to change their employment practices to treat both sexes fairly;
Twenty-one agreed to upgrade sports programs for girls;
Seventy-seven districts agreed to open up single-sex courses to both sexes:
Twenty agreed to change sex-biased student rules; and
Twenty-one institutions agreed to miscellaneous other changes.
Until fairly recently one subject was totally missing from curricula—the female experience. A new organization, the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), has been formed to
p. 37
give women's studies some national direction and coordination. But its efforts
are just beginning. "Compared with the number of colleges and universities in
the country, the number of women's studies programs that are recognized and
budgeted is small," said Blanche Hersh, coordinator of women's studies at
Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
"Research on women is missing in the disciplines; and because the systematic scholarly study of women has
not been fostered, there is no accurate presentation of the female experience." said Catherine Stimpson, a
Barnard College professor who edits Signs, a scholarly journal in the field of women's studies.
"History has overlooked half of the human existence," noted Patricia Palmier, Ph.D. candidate at
Harvard.
Pending legislation The new Vocational Education bill pending before Congress
in early 1978 extends and revises previous legislation, mandating criteria for distributing vocational
education funds within the States. Each State must allocate $50,000 of its Federal allotment for these
purposes and must develop curricula and guidance programs reflecting women's changing roles.
The Career Implementation Act (S1328) would assure equal access to career education programs. The proposed
Labor-HEW Appropriations Act (HR7555) carries an amendment that would ban timetables, ratios, and quotas
for achieving equity in education. This would reduce effective enforcement of Federal regulations. Action
has been postponed until later in 1978. The late Senator Humphrey proposed a bill (S255) that would
establish a separate Department of Education. Another bill (HR7) would provide career education in
elementary and secondary schools, but there is no indication that it attempts to eliminate sex
stereotyping or discrimination.
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