Thirty-Seven Words That Changed the Game
On June 23, 1972, President Nixon signed Title IX — 37 words banning sex discrimination in education that would revolutionize women's sports and schooling.
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Thirty-seven words. That is the entire heart of Title IX, the provision President Richard Nixon signed into law on June 23, 1972, as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. Buried in an omnibus education bill, those words would transform American schools, colleges, and playing fields more profoundly than almost any law of the century — and on the day he signed them, the president barely mentioned what they meant for women.
The law's authors were Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii and Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, with Representative Edith Green of Oregon also recognized as an early champion. Mink carried the fight in the House; Bayh, struggling to move the Equal Rights Amendment out of committee, took a different route. On February 28, 1972, with the Higher Education Act of 1965 up for reauthorization on the Senate floor, he offered his sex-discrimination ban as an amendment. It passed by voice vote. A House-Senate conference reconciled the versions that spring, Congress approved the final bill on June 8, and Nixon signed it on June 23 as Public Law 92-318.
At the signing, Nixon spoke mostly about desegregation busing. He did not mention the expansion of educational opportunity for women he had just enacted — a silence that says much about how little-noticed the provision was. Even its champions could not foresee what was coming. Bayh, who would later call Title IX his single greatest achievement, had aimed mainly at admissions and hiring: colleges that capped women's enrollment, departments that would not hire women faculty, schools that barred girls from shop class or physics.
The sports revolution was almost an accident. The statute never mentioned athletics. But when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued final enforcement regulations in June 1975, schools realized the law's logic applied to teams, scholarships, and facilities too. The numbers tell the story: before Title IX, only 1 in 27 American girls played high school sports; today, 2 in 5 do. In 1972, men out-earned college degrees over women by 12 percentage points; today women are more likely than men to hold them.
There was pushback, of course. In 1974, opponents tried to exempt revenue-producing college sports; Congress rejected the move and instead directed regulators to make reasonable allowances for the differing needs of particular sports. The law endured, was strengthened by court rulings, and in 1980 gained a dedicated enforcer in the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
Birch Bayh remains the only lawmaker since the nation's founders to author two amendments to the Constitution — the 25th, on presidential succession, and the 26th, lowering the voting age to 18. He died in 2019 at 91, having watched his 37 words remake a country. Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress, saw her name become synonymous with the law itself; the statute was formally renamed in her honor in 2002.
Thirty-seven words, signed on a summer day in 1972. They promised only a fair chance. They delivered a revolution.
No freely licensed photograph of the 1972 signing could be verified for this story, so it appears without an illustration rather than with an uncertain one.