ABSTRACT
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded programs. In 1979, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the Department of Education, the agency charged with administering Title IX, issued a Policy Interpretation setting forth a three-prong test for Title IX compliance. Most basically, a prohibition on sex discrimination means that individuals, regardless of their sex, must be treated the same with respect to some relevant criteria. What the relevant criteria are against which individuals may properly be judged and distinguished varies by context. The most commonly proposed alternative to distributing varsity athletic positions based on the percentages of women and men in the undergraduate student body is to distribute athletic positions based on women and men's relative levels of interest in athletics. From a theoretical standpoint, distributing scarce resources based on interest level is strange and atypical.
