Title IX was not intended at first to apply to sports. It was meant to get women into the law schools that had strict quotas, into the medical schools that had shut them out. According to the American Bar Association, in 1970 only 3 percent of lawyers were women — now they make up 54 percent of students enrolled in law schools. Overall, women make up 60 percent of enrolled college students.
In that sense and many other academic ones, Title IX has been a great success. Women (and for the purposes of this discussion we will use the binary while understanding that many people don’t sort themselves that way anymore) still lag in some areas, but the doors are not rigidly closed to them.