Peter Kalis: Title IX requires keeping women's sports for biological women
As I look back across five decades to my high school years, I’m confident that no biological males participated on our girls’ athletic teams. Why? We had no girls’ athletic teams on which biological males could participate. We had cheerleaders. Our football team finished 0-10. There is no question that our best athletes were in skirts on the sidelines.
How times have changed, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 had a lot to do with it.
Fast forward several years from my high school graduation. When I started law school, about 10% of my starting class was female, and that was pretty much the norm across the country. The author Walter Isaacson has pointed out that 15% of the mathematics Ph.D.s awarded in the 1930s were conferred upon women. Math in the 1930s was more favorable to women than law in the 1970s. You’ve heard the expression “she was the only woman in the conference room.” One of my former law partners was once the only woman lawyer in the entire law firm.
About 20 years ago, a London legal journalist half my age accusingly asked me why only about 10% of my law firm’s leaders were women. I said, well, when I started law school only 10% of law students were female. It made sense, and I was sure things would change over time. She was not persuaded.
Title IX was passed the same year I started law school and it launched a multi-decade revolution in girls’ and women’s sports in America by outlawing different treatment of females and males at educational institutions receiving federal monies. There is no question that the number of girls and women participating in interscholastic and intercollegiate team sports has grown exponentially in the past few decades. Title IX was a principal engine of this growth.
Law is a team sport. A Supreme Court justice for whom I clerked called it a contact sport. There is a saying that only fools or geniuses navigate law school alone. We form study groups. We talk with other students. We talk with our professors. We read what others have written and we share our writings on the issues of the day. We form moot court and mock trial teams, and we edit law reviews as a team.
Similarly, we practice law in teams. As women began to enter law schools in great numbers in the 1980s and 1990s — they now count as 55% of the national law school population — many arrived with backgrounds in team sports in which they had occupied leadership positions or otherwise were considered valuable team members. The comparative advantage of males had been erased. Is it any wonder that women have ascended to the pinnacle of our team-oriented profession?
Four of nine Supreme Court Justices are women, as are judges throughout the federal and state judicial systems. Many of the largest law firms in the world are led by women and all have women who head practice areas or departments. The editors of the two most prominent legal industry journals — The American Lawyer in the U.S. and The Lawyer in the U.K. — are women. Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank, is the former managing partner of a global law firm against which Reed Smith and K&L Gates routinely compete.
After years of studying innovators from Ada, Countess of Lovelace, to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson concluded that innovation results from teamwork more than from the efforts of a lone genius. Collaboration is the key. He mentions the Bell Labs’ “trading zone” where unscripted interactions were grist for the inventor’s mill. He describes “a collaboratively woven tapestry of creativity,” and notes that “great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large number of sources.”
Although law is a team sport, until recent times half the population was excluded from the team. With women now included, how much richer the collaboratively woven tapestry is and will be in the future for both men and women.
In my lifetime I’ve witnessed a slow motion, entirely beneficial revolution within the legal profession promoted by Title IX. I don’t want to see girls and young women cut off from the character-building experience of competing, leading and winning at the highest levels. Biological males participating in women’s sports threaten their achievement.
Line this old guy up with Martina Navratilova, Samantha Ponder, Riley Gaines and other women standing up for fairness in women sports. May the best biological woman prevail.
Peter Kalis, prior to his retirement, served for 20 years as chairman and global managing partner of K&L Gates LLP.