This week I’m linking to some of my favorite blog posts from this year, and especially ones that drew some vigorous, and even heated, discussion. As you’ll see, most of them pertain to women’s sports but there are some other subjects I’ll revisit here.

The first installment is my post from April 27 entitled “The real elephant of Title IX compliance.” I wrote it at the start of a series of gender equity stories in The New York Times that reflects so much of what I consider wrong-headed thinking on this topic.

Far too often, the mainstream media world I’ve inhabited most of my career has been terrified to address Title IX and gender equity from anything but the perspective of women’s sports activists, attorneys, academics and others who’ve made this their life’s work.

This post — and do read the comments — also triggered a longer project on women’s sports that I posted in June and that I will be revisiting this week as well.

This is the ninth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Today is a day to celebrate. As it should be.

As Title IX enters its 40th year, and with another 12 months of buildup until another milestone, we will be hearing a lot more of what we’ve been hearing about the law from all the usual suspects.

The individuals and organizations I have examined here will be undeterred in sticking to their talking points, all of which have been examined in this series.

While I do believe that many of these people do believe what they say, they’re also smart to keep the charge in their rhetoric. It furthers their advocacy, and helps them accrue brownie points in their careers as professional feminists.

A subversion of the law

Latest example: University of Pittsburgh law professor Deborah Brake, author of the recent book “Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women’s Sports Revolution.” Formerly a staff attorney at the National Women’s Law Center (a charter member of The Sisterhood), Brake promises readers what she claims to be the first legal analysis of the law as it pertains to sports. More than anything, she serves up warmed-over diatribes about the patriarchy, and gives away her true aim — adding sports to the realm of “feminist legal theory” — almost from the start:

“It is time to move gender equality in this area to a more central place in a feminist agenda.”

This book is not really about sports at all. As the following passages reveal, for Brake the story of female athleticism is an abstract to serve a much more holy purpose. Not only that, but she actually disdains everything that Title IX was meant to be when Congress passed it 39 years ago today. To her, the law hardly goes far enough, because men still rule the roost in sports. A few dreadful examples:

“Unfortunately, Title IX’s approach to gender equality has made no serious attempt to expand the range of masculinities sports constructs, and it has failed to disrupt sport’s linkage to hegemonic masculinity.”

“Degendering sports is an important part of securing sex equality in sports.”

“For the most part, schools have done little to change a sports culture that links hetero-masculinity to athleticism.”

“The law has been less successful at reigning in the privileges of elite men’s college sports.”

And then there is this:

“. . . Title IX’s utter lack of success in challenging the culture of heterosexual male privilege that pervades men’s sports.”

And so it goes on like this, for 230 bloody, mind-numbing pages.This was not Mariah Burton Nelson writing in 1994, but rather a law professor in 2010.

Brake is less a Title IX legal scholar than an ideologue. But you wouldn’t know it judging from uncritical interviews on a higher education website and NPR’s acclaimed “Only a Game” program when her book was published.

Not only do Brake and her like-minded sisters I’ve profiled here give women’s sports a bad name. They also marginalize them more effectively than any hegemonic masculinist ever did.

The temptation to fight the past

For nearly three decades, Jack Fertig was as a men’s assistant basketball coach at a number of universities, including Tennessee, where he became an early and still-avid admirer of Pat Summitt. At USC, he was fond of Trojan basketball great Cheryl Miller, who served as head coach in the mid-1990s and became a pariah in her own sport when she succeeded Marianne Stanley, who was fighting and later lost an equal pay battle in federal court.

Fertig also served on Fresno State’s athletics gender equity committee while on Jerry Tarkanian’s staff in the last decade, during one of the nastiest Title IX disputes in recent memory. In a recent blog post, Fertig, now a public speaker and teacher in Fresno, recalled those memories while watching his current high school’s girls softball team, and wondered what the landscape for women’s sports might be like today had females not been held back for so long. He appreciates the historical march women have made in sports, and like a lot of men of his time, has regrets about the past.

But then there’s his frank closing passage:

“There is no argument that the female gender was hindered by the lack of opportunity and, certainly, the women’s rights movement hastened justice in that area. Now that women are afforded the chance to compete, whether it be in the athletic field, medical field or, simply, at the ballot box, there are some women who aren’t – and never will be – satisfied. They are bound and determined to ‘make up for the past.’

“I was in a coaches’ meeting once when the director of athletics posed the following question to a female coach, ‘Would you rather see the football team win so we make more money and everybody’s budget is increased or would you rather everybody’s budget be cut?’ Without hesitation, she chose the latter. Later, when a foolish, vengeful proposal was brought up, one of the men coaches said, ‘That would screw the men’s sports.’ The same miserable female coach retorted, ‘Good. We got it for 20 years; now it’s your turn.’

“If you guessed the meeting took place at Fresno State, you wouldn’t be too far off. Fighting for a just cause is noble. Continuing to be – I coined the term, a contrarian – does nothing but cause ill will and becomes a divisive force helping no one but the ego of the contrarian.

“It’s truly a shame women weren’t offered identical chances men were at the same time nor does it make sense. As the popular Virginia Slims commercial told the world, though, women have come a long way, baby. Unfortunately, there are those who feel they haven’t won unless someone else has lost. Since we’re all members of the same ‘team,’ it would behoove us to work together constructively rather than destructively.”

(If you think Fertig is tough toward some of the women he dealt with at Fresno State, check out his assessment of Nick Saban during the latter’s one season as Toledo football coach, where Fertig also worked. “Alpha dog” and “Big Kahuna” are among the more charitable descriptions he has for the current Alabama coach.)

One of the most troublesome issues I have with establishment sports feminism is its zeal to allow the past to influence the present, as if we were still in that past. Because of this, there also is little contemplation of the future. What Fertig has written here is something he and I discussed at length last summer when we first became acquainted.

He’s also making a crucial distinction between the need to identify and eradicate true discrimination and the doggedness of some women’s sports advocates who feel the need to fight every grievance, real or perceived, to the death. This is a distinction that has been long lost on the likes of Deborah Brake, Donna Lopiano, Erin Buzuvis, Mary Jo Kane, Mariah Burton Nelson, et al. Their fanaticism is cemented, even though they will continue to be regarded as authorities on Title IX when they’re cited by the mainstream media.

Yet Fertig is closer to appreciating the true spirit of Title IX than any of them.

In perhaps the only true sentence of her book, Brake just glosses over it:

“Title IX’s biggest success, and its most revolutionary impact in term of producing cultural transformation, is the huge increase in the number of girls who grow up playing organized sports, with many of them continuing to do so into adulthood.”

That’s all the law was meant to do.

Title IX was never meant to be an end unto itself, a self-perpetuating mechanism commanded by those who have mastered the legal process and are adept in connecting with the media, and for those who have made it a creed, an article of faith, and even a belief system.

It was, and is, a vehicle for those girls and women who encounter legal obstacles to gain equal access to educational and sports opportunities. It’s up to them to take advantage of those opportunities (or not), and it has been their continuous and growing participation that has changed the culture, as Brake mentions, and not the male-bashing, utopian notions of jargon-spouting academic feminists like her trying to boost their professional bona fides.

If Title IX and women’s sports are to continue to thrive, the law needs a new compliance framework for sports and the “movement” needs some new leaders. Because both Title IX as it is enforced now and some of its most vocal adherents are worn out and have nothing new to offer.

Coming Friday: In the concluding post of this series, I finally explain what the racquet pictured above is all about, and why I’ve found it necessary to make all the racket about women’s sports. This might be more personal than I planned, but what I’ve learned from writing this series, and exchanging thoughts and ideas with readers, has been a revelation.

Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the sixth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Since I’ve been saying for quite a while that the 3-part test for Title IX sports compliance is flawed, I thought I ought to propose how the law might be improved. I’m not alone in suggesting at least an evaluation of where we are after more than 30 years, but you probably won’t hear much about all that this week, with Thursday’s 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX approaching. The Sisterhood chanting has already begun. It will be largely uncritical.

The College Sports Council, which has called for changes to Title IX for a number of years, wants to reinstate the interest survey (boosted by the Bush administration in 2005 but booted by the Obama administration in 2009). This is a non-starter for the Title IX diehards, who claim that women are as interested in sports as men. While I generally agree with the CSC on Title IX issues, it offers few other ideas on reforming the law.

I may under the biggest illusion of all in believing that the 3-part test can be replaced with new regulations to fit the times. But I’ll throw out a few ideas that are by no means anything more than that.

But first, here are the three options for Title IX sports compliance that were adopted in 1979:

– The percentage of female and male athletes is substantially proportionate to the percentage of female and male undergraduates, respectively.

– Demonstrate a history of continuing and expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex (women in virtually every instance).

– “Fully and effectively” accommodate the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex (again, this is almost always females).

Why the 3-part test must go

It’s antiquated. When the HEW policy interpretation cited above went into effect, women were in the distinct minority in college athletic programs, and far below parity in higher education overall. The latter is hardly the case today, with women comprising in many cases 55-60 percent of a college’s undergraduate enrollment.

With regards to the first test, while women are not at 50 percent in most cases in athletic departments, they are surpassing that in some instances, even at programs with large football programs. Example in my backyard: The University of Georgia, where 52 percent of the athletes are women. But because the female undergraduate enrollment is 58 percent, a school with one of the most successful women’s athletics programs in the nation is vulnerable to Title IX litigation.

That’s why UGA likely will add another women’s sport in the near future. Like many schools, it is open to a lawsuit for reasons having nothing to do with sports, but rather how many females, most of whom will never suit up, gain admission through a non-athletic component of the university administration.

It punishes male athletes. Title IX absolutists expect athletic departments to keep up with enrollment patterns, but to reasonable people this truly is the warped logic of proportionality. Georgia hasn’t cut men’s teams to move closer toward complying with the first test, thanks to bulging athletic coffers. But it’s the exception and not the rule.

As for the second test, there’s no seeming end to how long women’s teams may be added. There’s one big problem: There aren’t that many more sports to add. The NCAA’s list of Emerging Sports for Women, which is compiled to assist athletic programs with Title IX compliance, currently has only four sports, and one of them, squash, will be dropped in August.

The other three sports don’t figure to attract a groundswell of support; indeed, both equestrian and sand volleyball were issued reprieves by the NCAA last year after failing to add enough varsity programs to “show promise” of being NCAA-sponsored sports. The other is rugby, which currently has only two varsity women’s teams in the entire nation. If the NCAA can’t find any viable new sports to add then perhaps “emerging” is the wrong choice of words.

Lacrosse, now reaching into the Deep South, may be the only women’s sport left with major growth potential. There’s also the controversial subject of competitive cheerleading, which I’ll discuss in a later post this week.

As for the third test, it’s hard to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of the underrepresented sex if you can’t adequately survey what those interests may be. The Title IX establishment doesn’t trust interest surveys, claiming they could get caught in an e-mail spam filter. It’s more likely they fear the answers that women students may provide won’t jibe with their proportionality ideal. A political favor by the Obama White House has made the activists happy (as conservative interests were pleased with the 2005 Bush policy clarification), and that’s all that matters. This prong has been effectively neutered.

What I’d like to see

The battle to get girls and women in the game has been a resounding success. Shifting the Title IX compliance framework away from participation and toward taking care of what’s been built is a possibility worth pondering.

Another example in my backyard: Two years ago, Georgia Tech — which because of its low female enrollment achieved proportionality years ago — opened a beautiful new on-campus softball stadium for its nationally ranked program. Tech has just seven teams for women, and is the only school in the ACC without a women’s soccer program. Without the pressure of having to add teams, Tech is better resourcing what teams it has, which helps with recruiting and enhances the student-athlete experience.

Throughout the country, there are still are plenty of disparities in facilities, funding, equipment, travel and recruiting budgets and related components of operating a college sports team. This is part of Title IX compliance, too, but it’s overshadowed by the furor over the 3-part test. A recent series of stories in the Ball State student newspaper illustrated what work remains to be done, and it is considerable at that school and many others.

Imagine this: Instead of wasting time and money adding teams in obscure sports that struggle to attract participants, schools could use those dollars on better venues, improve coaching salary scales and create an environment for women athletes that’s truly special. New regulations based around these deficiencies would fulfill the spirit of Title IX better than the current numbers game athletics departments have to play to get right with proportionality.

So much of the money that is spent on women’s sports has often come with little of what I call emotional support, and this might be the biggest shortcoming of all. Too many athletics directors simply throw money at women’s teams because they have to under Title IX, and then go off and deal with football boosters or new arena architects. They don’t want to be bothered.

Far too many women’s teams, especially in basketball, could stand to be better marketed and promoted. There’s plenty of TV exposure in hoops thanks to rich conference multi-sport deals, but a more ground-level marketing wouldn’t hurt. If they’re not going to make money, at least they could draw more of a crowd. Too many schools do too little in this regard, and this change has to start at the top.

On the other hand, women’s sports activists who have won resoundingly in the courts for their cause also have won over few people with their us vs. them, to-the-death tactics. It’s hard to give something emotional support when you might be sued by people who have no interest in persuading you to care.

Coming Tuesday: Why all these ideas — or anyone else’s — are likely to go splat. And why unwedding football from proportionality is a longshot.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

Thanks to all those on Twitter and elsewhere for their comments this week to the start of my series, “Women’s Sports Without Illusions.” I’m really humbled by it all.

Of course, I’m not expecting the precincts of The Sisterhood to report in, at least directly. They prefer to stay wrapped in a cocoon of their own making, locking up blog comments and talking only among themselves.

I’m not sure I intended it to turn out this way, but my posts this week ended up being a short history of the women’s sports movement, nearly decade-by-decade. As I’ve been pointing out, this isn’t just about Title IX. Perhaps my biggest arguments have been about the cultural grievances that I outlined in Parts 4 and 5.

Next week, which marks the 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, I want to lay out some ideas about where women’s sports goes next — indeed, where they actually are now. These include reworking Title IX and examining the challenge of women’s pro sports and developing women’s sports around the world, where true oppression still exists.

Of course, I may under the biggest illusion of all in thinking we can move beyond the rhetorical, legal and other cultural realities of the present. I just want to revive the notion of “joy” in women’s sports, which its leaders have disdained for a very long time now.

Regardless of your views on this — and if you disagree, please speak up — let’s start having a conversation. This was one of the main reasons for me taking the plunge and putting this series together. Feel free to comment here or on any of the posts in this series.

Oh, and I promise to write a lot shorter next week!

Part 1: The elusive notion of gender equality in sports

Part 2: Women’s sports and the matter of choice

Part 3: How women have held back women’s sports

Part 4: Making football the enemy of women’s sports

Part 5: Sports and eros, or why sex is more fun than gender

This is the first in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that will critically examine the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues. The story behind this racquet, which symbolizes some seemingly conflicting thoughts and experiences I’ve had in women’s sports, also will be revealed.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Reading this unsigned editorial earlier this year in The New York Times prompted me to wonder anew — and yet again — about the meaning of a word that seems simple enough, but that has become fraught with confusion, contentiousness and ill will in the realm of women’s sports:

“Equality.”

The University of California-Berkeley’s decision to reinstate three of five varsity sports that were initially dropped because of severe budget deficits is the latest in the long, continuing and often fractious history of Title IX compliance. As far as this anonymous Times editorial writer is concerned, as well as some others in the mainstream media, there’s only one side to this story: The alleged grievances of women being “denied” opportunities to compete because their participation numbers do not closely match the percentage of female undergraduate students.

As I re-read the brief commentary, I was struck not just by the lame, pop culture-influenced headline — “True Grit and Title IX” — but also by the implicit suggestion that no reasonable person could ever disagree with how gender equality in sports should be defined.

Yet players and coaches on the Cal baseball and men’s gymnastics teams had a very different perspective that was unaddressed, as was the fact that a vocal advocacy has existed for more than a decade that favors revising Title IX to curb unintended consequences against male athletes.

For the Times editorial writer, apparently, male athletes exist only in the abstract, as privileged creatures who stand on the exalted side of the elusive “gender gap” that must be closed in terms of statistical parity.

On Feb. 8 the Times revealed threats of Title IX lawsuits on behalf of athletes on the Cal women’s gymnastics and lacrosse teams. Those sports will be continued, along with the highly successful men’s rugby team, due to fundraising efforts. In an interesting twist, the Cal baseball team was given new life in April, with the aim of making a profit. Even more happily, the baseball team on Sunday qualified for the College World Series in what has to be one of the more gratifying sports stories of the year.

And yet . . .

“The march toward equality is long,” began another paragraph of the Times editorial, and it was here that my attention trailed off, as I jumped to an even more dubious conclusion:

“Thanks to Title IX, if something has to give, equality doesn’t go first.”

In other words, male athletes with no legal protections have to go when something has to give. Or, as in the case of Cal, the men’s teams have to raise money to pay their own way, while the women get their teams back by threatening legal action. This is what should not be ignored, especially by fair-minded advocates for women’s sports.

Defining equality down

But more than 30 years since the the three-part test for Title IX sports compliance came into being, we are are stuck with the reality, bolstered by the courts in such landmark cases as Cohen v. Brown, that “equality” is all about getting numbers right. The mandate according to proportionality, since Cohen the de facto letter of Title IX sports law, is to raise the percentage of female athletes to nearly match the percentage of undergraduate female students. At many colleges that’s a figure ranging between 55 and 60 percent.

And if this doesn’t happen, according to this line of thinking, then there still must be discrimination.

This is how the push to end sex bias in sports — a noble effort that I have always supported — evolved into a highly-charged, occasionally angry crusade oblivious to the individual choices women have made because Title IX has opened up a multitude of educational, vocational and extracurricular pursuits to them.

The law, which initially made no reference to sports, was passed by Congress in 1972 to lift the artificially low numbers ceiling on women students in male-dominated fields of study. How ironic it is that Title IX sports compliance, as well as the definition of gender equality in sports, has become beholden to numbers.

Indeed, as women continue to flock to colleges and universities, they have demonstrated that they will go undaunted where their interests lead them. With the exception of the STEM curriculum — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — women are at or above 50-50 parity with men across the academic spectrum. This includes medicine, business and law. Certainly there have been concerted pushes by colleges and universities to make educational programs more attractive to women, as the Wharton School of Business has demonstrated with its MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania.

What also has been clearly documented after these decades of dramatic progress is that the interests of women, both in the classroom and away from it, are far more wide-ranging than those of men.

This goes right to the heart of the trouble with defining, much less achieving, a universal notion of equality in the sex-segregated world of college athletics. While special measures also have been necessary to open the fields, courts, pools and other venues of sports to females, the three-part test, and especially the proportionality provision, places an artificial mandate on college athletic departments that may not necessarily coincide with the desires of female students.

It may have made more sense at the time to set some general and reasonable numerical goals, some “affirmative action,” if you will, given the lack of women’s teams and athletes.

That is no longer the case, and to presume that women are as interested in sports at the same rate in which they enroll in a school is absurd, even if that number is around 50-50. That the percentages are more skewed toward women has come at the expense of some unfortunate male athletes in sports that don’t produce revenues, don’t have strong constituencies and don’t have the law on their side.

It’s about more than Title IX

More importantly, this hardline view about Title IX has infected so much thinking and action about women in sports that goes beyond the issue of complying with the law.

The Cal story illustrates what I’ve felt for many years, that the simplistic ways in which equality for women in sports is defined and advocated is actually hurting the cause for women’s sports. While these pronouncements are nothing new, it’s also startling that nearly four decades after Title IX, we haven’t allowed for a more nuanced and open-ended public debate that incorporates more than one strident point of view.

We’re saddled with outdated regulations, rhetoric and assumptions that come straight out of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was in college and women were in the minority on most campuses. We inhabit a very different world, and for women athletes now it’s a far better world.

As a pre-Title IX youth athlete who supports the law but advocates changes in how it is enforced, I’m devoting daily posts over the next two weeks detailing how the women’s sports movement lost its way, and what a future for female athletes might look like if we can ever get beyond the current manifestations of Title IX, a seemingly endless caravan of litigation and some of the noxious cultural wars over gender and sports that have resulted.

Coming Tuesday: Why women’s sports advocates ignore the individual choices of women who don’t go for sports, all in the name of equality.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

The producers of the Title IX documentary “In the Game” Tweeted a link to this ESPN story over the weekend about the paucity of women in action sports. The headline, “Gender Gap,” sums up so much of the wrong-headed approach to gauging the progress of women in sports, especially in the mainstream media. Says writer Matt Higgins:

“According to Marie Case, managing director of Board-Trac, an action sports market research company, in 2010 there were about 18 million participants in the U.S. across skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing, 25 percent of whom were women. Of approximately 2.6 million surfers, 31.8 percent were female; of 6.7 million snowboarders, 24.2 percent were female; and of 8 million skaters, only 12.6 percent were female.

And then there’s this:

“Title IX, a law dating to 1972 that bars discrimination among programs that receive federal funding, has meant more opportunities for girls to play sports in school. But with action sports typically outside the scope of public schools and universities, opportunities for females are largely governed by the rules of the marketplace.”

Of course I wish there were more women in sports, politics, technology and international finance, for much more than the sake of representation. Our games, laws, gadgets and economy would be a hell of a lot better, fairer, easier to use and more inclusive than they are now.

But we’re so busy counting up numbers and determining percentages even in relatively new sports involving a post-Title IX generation of women and where gender equity laws do not apply that we overlook another major factor that is mentioned nowhere in this story.

Choice.

That’s always been an important word for establishment feminists when it comes to a woman’s right to control her own body, a concept with which I strongly agree. But they never seem to consider it when it comes to examining why women don’t do certain things in greater numbers.

They may not want to.

Consider the example of competitive cheerleading, which is producing a bit of a split among women’s sports advocates and that The New York Times examined earlier this week in its continuing “Gender Games” series. Says Nancy Hogshead-Makar of the Women’s Sports Foundation:

“As long as it’s actually operating as a sport, we welcome it into the women’s sports tent.”

Which sounds fair enough. Then there’s former college basketball player Barbara Osborne, whom were told now advises college athletic departments as an “expert” on gender equity:

“What we consider sports are things that men have traditionally played.”

To be fair, Osborne said she wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of counting cheerleading as a legitimate sport, but there remains quite a bit of reluctance.

Both women are quite eager to declare themselves authorities on what other women ought to aspire to athletically. Both could be more tolerant toward the individual courses that women are choosing for their lives thanks to Title IX. It’s a good law that needs to be kept on the books.

But Hogshead-Makar’s organization has been a stingy gatekeeper of a “women’s sports tent” that isn’t as expansive as it might be. And Osborne’s comment gives away the primary conceit of the gender equity establishment: That male-dominated fields should be the Promised Land for women to satisfy their ambitions, whether it’s sports or other educational or professional areas.

Cheerleading is such a hot topic because of the unending numbers game college athletic departments have to play in order to keep Title IX litigants at bay. As are the so-called “emerging sports” the NCAA suggests schools consider adding to get to proportionality but that don’t generate much interest from actual female athletes. Sand volleyball received a last-minute reprieve from being dropped from the NCAA list last year, but squash will soon get the axe. In August, the list will be down to just three sports — equestrian, rugby and sand volleyball.

(And I’m not the only female sportswriter who’s had a change of mind about cheerleading.)

The presumption that women would naturally be flocking to sports in the same numbers as men if only the “opportunities” were there is undercut by the first story in the Times series that revealed how men are counted as women in order to get the numbers right.

This desperation will continue as long as Title IX sports compliance remains tethered to a set of numbers that made sense 30 years ago, when women were in distinct minorities as students and athletes. That is no longer the case, as women are dominating undergraduate enrollment and even at big football schools are approaching or surpassing 50 percent of the athletes.

Here’s a better baseline for not only reworking the Title IX regulations but also rethinking what we mean by gender equity:

Celebrate the women who do choose to participate in sports and make it a big part of their lives, but respect and honor the choices of women who do not.

Never mind the gender gap. It’s not the truest measure of equality, but rather the most simplistic way of comparing men and women with the effect of perpetually dividing them.