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GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Trained in mathematics, Georgetown Athletic Director Joseph C. Lang says numbers don't lie. But in evaluating a university athletic program's gender equity, he thinks they can mislead.

At the private Jesuit University, 51 percent of the 6,048 undergraduates now are women. University-provided data show that 39 percent of 751 athletes at Georgetown are women, 61 percent men. Lang says percentages alone don't adequately illustrate gender equity. Georgetown has taken other steps to foster equal opportunity to both genders, he says. The university has 12 varsity sports for men, 11 for women.

Two other tests of compliance with Title IX involve a university meeting the needs and abilities of its undergraduates or showing ongoing expansion in sports involving the underrepresented sex. In both of these areas, Lang said, Georgetown is compliant.

"Institutionally," he said, "we've always tried look at it with an overview to try and provide as many opportunities as we could within the constraints of the space and the facilities and the budget will allow."

As an urban university with virtually no open land to build upon, Georgetown can be limited in the range of sports it might add, school officials say. Georgetown, for instance, has no women's softball team in part because it has lacked the space to install a field.

Lang said the university has avoided cutting a single men's athletic program by reallocating resources to develop women's sports. He estimates that women's sports now have 45 percent of the university's athletic scholarships.

Students in each incoming class are surveyed as to which sports they'd like to play. After an increasing number of women showed an interest in soccer earlier this decade, Georgetown made it a varsity sport.

Football, a non-scholarship sport with 89 males, greatly contributes to Georgetown's imbalance in participation numbers. Without the sport, Georgetown's varsity teams would have 54 percent men, 46 percent women.

But the university is averse to cutting a program instituted early this century and one that fulfills the athletic needs of a relatively large segment of its male undergraduates. As long as Georgetown remains Title IX-compliant, school officials say, football will endure.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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