Few topics spark more debate and fervor in college sports crowds than Title IX. Broadening the Title IX debate to the gendering of athletics and power, Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano have written an authoritative account, and Playing with the Boys provides a refreshing and relevant analysis of the meaning and significance of sports in American culture. Rather than focus on the zero-sum complaint that the growth in opportunities for women athletes has come at the expense of male athletes, the authors take aim at the larger regime of “coercive sex-segregated” athletics and argue that “separate is not equal in sports” (p. 8). The authors seek to redirect the conversation about Title IX by asserting that “segregation in sports should be called out for what it is: a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The policy premise in sports should be neutral as to sex classification, just as it is neutral on the issue of race classification” (p. 28).

McDonagh and Pappano's central thesis is that coercive sex-segregated sports policies are based not on the athletic ability of any particular girl or woman but rather on sex categorization, which assumes all women should be barred from competition with men at every skill level in athletics. The result of this assumption is a discriminatory regime that leads to sex-typed styles of sports performance, different athletic competition rules, inequitable opportunities for athletic participation, unequal reward structures for players and coaches, and ultimately different sex-segregated opportunities for political and economic power acquired through sports.

The authors provide evidence from the nineteenth century to the present about how women's participation in the realm of athletics has been framed by “the three I's: inferiority, injury, and immorality” (p. 33). That is, women have had to confront barriers erected on the assumption that they are athletically inferior, more prone to injury, and engaged in immoral behavior when they play sports, especially those involving physical contact.

The book has an impressive sweep, focusing on sports through the lens of physiology, congressional policymaking, and public law, and touching an array of sports from billiards and bowling to horseracing and baseball. The authors interrogate the meaning of sex in terms of biological and genetic differences as well as the social construction of gender and the performance of gender in sports. While acknowledging that men on average will have physiological advantages in those sports where height and weight are factors, the authors point to evidence of female physical advantages, for example, where the athlete is subject to extreme temperatures such as dog sled racing and long-distance swimming. Sex categories, they argue, carry limited empirical value for predicting performance. Even where physical advantages of men and women might be present, the authors argue that motivation, training, and perseverance often trump physical factors shaping performance. They offer the example (one among many) of five-foot, one-hundred-pound Lynn Hill, “the first person—male or female—to free climb the treacherous nose of El Capitan in Yosemite Park,” a feat she accomplished not just once but twice (p. 63).

The authors recount the history of Title IX and its origins in advancing educational opportunities for women. The gendering of educational opportunities is a long and familiar story, beginning with the nineteenth-century warnings of the dangers posed by higher education to a woman's reproductive capacity. At mid-twentieth century, the GI Bill offered educational opportunity to millions of men but benefited only a fraction of women involved in the war effort and specifically excluded female air force service pilots (WASPs) and members of the Women's Auxiliary Corps (WACs) from veterans' benefits (p. 89). Title IV of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 prohibited segregation in education on the basis of race but did not include mention of sex. To rectify these educational inequalities, Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 became the transformative policy, and from its passage through several contested attempts at implementation, the most controversial elements have dealt with the issue of sports.

The authors draw interesting parallels between participation in sports and case law applying the employment-related concept of bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs). They also analogize sex-segregated women's sports with the disability model, noting that segregating “abled” students from “disabled” students has been replaced with educational practice emphasizing mainstreaming and inclusion. Tracing some five hundred sex segregation and discrimination court cases since 1971, the authors conclude, “Given the long history of female exclusion from sports, courts have also made it clear that girls can play on all-female teams or on male teams. That is not true for males (although some boys do in fact participate on female teams in some places, often in high school field hockey or volleyball, if challenged legally they may have difficulty). Thus the courts have ruled that women may voluntarily segregate themselves, but it is unconstitutional to segregate them coercively” (p. 144).

Ultimately, sport is contested territory not because of a lack of clarity in the application of the Equal Protection Clause but because of the cultural need to preserve an important domain of masculinity. Some of the most formidable barriers to women's participation are thus socially invented barriers ranging from theories about women's inherent weakness to proscriptions about appropriate women's attire when exercising. From the 1850s “muscular Christianity” movement to the birth of football at the end of the nineteenth century, sports and athleticism not only reinforced manhood and virility but also provided the impetus for nation building, the socialization of immigrants to American values, and promotion of national identity (pp. 158–59).

If there is a significant weakness in McDonagh and Pappano's book, it rests with the evidentiary basis for connecting sports with social, economic, and political power. The authors cover these topics and provide anecdotal evidence of economic inequalities in everything from athletic salaries to ticket prices, but for skeptics, a more compelling case could be made. The book identifies a handful of notables whose athletic careers were followed with political office-holding, including U.S. Senator (and pro baseball pitcher) Jim Bunning, gubernatorial candidate (and NFL wide receiver) Lynn Swann, and President (and former Little Leaguer) George W. Bush. These anecdotes are contrasted with reports by former Congresswomen Nancy Johnson and Karen Thurman of the important lessons of teamwork and competition that they learned playing sports. While women may be able to point to character-building values learned through sports, few have been able to capitalize politically on the sports spotlight. At the same time, literally dozens of male elected officials have parlayed athletic fame and fortune into electoral success from disparate endeavors including bodybuilding (California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), pro wrestling (former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura), running (U.S. Representative Jim Ryun), basketball (former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson), Olympic judo (former U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell), Olympic track (U.S. Representative Ralph Metcalfe), college football coaching (U.S. Representative Tom Osborne), and professional football (present and former U.S. Representatives Steve Largent, J. C. Watts, Heath Shuler, and Jack Kemp).

The economic analysis likewise would be much more potent with a stronger empirical case rather than several individual anecdotes. For example, comparing the total payout by professional sports associations for men's and women's golf, tennis, and rodeo riding, one learns that men's winnings (not including endorsement or appearance fees) exceed that of women in comparable sports by as little as one and a half times (tennis) to five times (rodeo riding) or six times (golf). The mean earnings for the top fifty athletes in each sport reveal similar multiples favoring the men (see Rod Hilpirt, Scott Wysong, Sheila Hartley, Mike Latino, and Andrea Zabkar, “Show Me the Money! A Cross-Sport Comparative Study of Compensation for Independent Contractor Professional Athletes,” The Sport Journal 10, no. 4 (2007): http://www.thesportjournal.org/article/show-me-money-cross-sport-comparative-study-compensation-independent-contractor-professional).

This weakness aside, McDonagh and Pappone have produced an engaging and provocative analysis of gender and sports. As a product of pre–Title IX college basketball and as a mayor who had to chide our local parks department in 2009 to allow girls to play Little League baseball, I believe that this book has the potential to change the conversation if not the positions of those debating gender equity in sports.