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Complaining of discrimination against men may seem counterintuitive, but consider the facts. Men are, on average, disadvantaged relative to women in several key respects in developed countries such as the United States. Men are the majority of prisoners and the majority of the homeless. Men live shorter lives in part due to higher rates of suicide and workplace deaths. Bias against male defendants may contribute to sex disparities in the American criminal justice system, including in the administration of the death penalty. American women control 60 percent of personal wealth and make or influence 85 percent of all consumer purchases.
Poorer outcomes for men may stem in part from structural inequalities in the American education system. About 77 percent of teachers in the public education system are women. Girls get higher grades than boys in all subjects. Several studies suggest that stereotyping can bias teachers' assessment and grading against boys. The U.S. Department of Education has for some time steadily and selectively limited athletic opportunities for men. High school boys are much more likely to face (often counterproductive) disciplinary actions such as suspensions or expulsion than are girls. Women compose an ever-increasing majority of college students nationwide. The overwhelming majority of those sanctioned in schools under Title IX rules are male, and the majority of Title IX administrators are women.
The federal government is only widening these gender disparities. The United States Department of Education sided with female complainants 24 times as often as with male complainants between 2012 and 2019. The department's invidious overreach has been criticized by many, including liberal giants like Janet Napolitano, Jerry Brown, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Many male complainants have attempted to plead their cases before the very federal agency responsible for their plight. Perhaps unsurprisingly, results have been mixed. The Department of Education accepted a class-action complaint against the University of Southern California (USC), for example, during the latter days of the Obama administration, establishing a precedent that male victims have collective rights under Title IX. The department also launched a civil rights investigation against USC in 2018 following allegations that various campus initiatives and scholarships provided unfair advantages to women. This was followed by an investigation of similar discrimination at Yale University, which led to a flurry of press coverage and grassroots activism.
The department launched investigations of female-only programs and affirmative action preferences at institutions such as Tulane University, Georgetown University, Northeastern University, the University of Kansas, and the University of Idaho. (We authored a number of these complaints, sometimes in collaboration with other parties.) Our research found that Cornell University in particular engages in systemic discrimination against its male minority. We argue that Cornell discriminates against men in college admissions, medical services, recruitment, employment, residential spaces, scholarships, and professional organizations. The coalition complaint against Cornell was signed by 748 individuals, including attorneys, professors, authors, and activists.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration is making it harder to hold these institutions accountable. The Education Department dismissed the Yale complaint, which we authored, on the pretext that, in order to make a discrimination claim, we must find men who specifically apply to and are rejected by programs that exclude men both in theory and practice. This standard is specious. No reasonable man would apply to programs that are unambiguously designed to exclude men.
This standard is not even necessary to establish that men face discrimination. A sizable proportion of male students (26 percent) surveyed at Yale reported personally experiencing discrimination on the basis of sex. The department could have easily requested copies of internal complaints or reached out to the students who reported such sentiments. Moreover, we provided examples of male students suing Yale under Title IX and an affidavit from a former Yale employee who complained about exclusionary programs. Federal attorneys chose to ignore all this.
Despite its obvious flaws, the department appears to be adopting this standard as a general principle. For example, the New York Regional Office dismissed parts of a Title IX complaint against Columbia University and Barnard College because we were unable to identify men who specifically applied to female-only programs.
The department's tortuous logic violates both common sense and Supreme Court doctrine. To quote Hans Bader, an attorney who specializes in discrimination cases: "when an institution has an explicit—or veiled but consistent—exclusion of a particular group, members of that group don't have to apply to have standing to sue for discrimination over that exclusion." He cites the Supreme Court in Teamsters v. United States (1977):
If an employer should announce his policy of discrimination by a sign reading "Whites Only" on the hiring-office door, his victims would not be limited to the few who ignored the sign and subjected themselves to personal rebuffs. The same message can be communicated to potential applicants more subtly but just as clearly by an employer's actual practices—by his consistent discriminatory treatment of actual applicants, by the manner in which he publicizes vacancies, his recruitment techniques, his responses to casual or tentative inquiries, and even by the racial or ethnic composition of that part of his work force from which he has discriminatorily excluded members of minority groups.
The U.S. Department of Education simply refuses to conform to this Supreme Court doctrine. We exhort the federal government to reverse course and continue investigating colleges for discrimination against the male minority. Striving towards gender equity includes concern for disparities impacting both women and men.
James Moore II is a Professor Emeritus of Industrial & Systems Engineering, of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Spiro Pantazatos is a Research Scientist and Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology at Columbia University. Kursat Christoff Pekgoz has a B.Sc. from Bilkent University, an M.A. from Bosphorus University, and an M.A. from the University of Southern California. He is the CEO of Doruk Inc.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
