55 percent of the students, 42 percent of the athletes: the Title IX proportionality gap, measured

Women are 55.15 percent of undergraduates and 42.10 percent of athletic participants at the 2,037 institutions that filed an Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act report for AY 2024-25. The difference is 13.05 percentage points. In 2014-15 the same calculation across the same file returned 11.37 points, so the gap did not close over the decade. It opened.

That single subtraction is Prong 1 of the Title IX three-part test, and it is unusually cheap to compute because EADA carries both sides of the ratio on the same row. ef_female_count and ef_male_count (IPEDS undergraduate fall enrollment, denormalized onto every sport record) sit next to sum_partic_women and sum_partic_men. No join, no crosswalk. When your president gets asked this question, the answer is one query away, out of a file you already had to file.

One definition to fix before anything else. Participants here are roster spots, not people. A two-sport athlete counts twice. EADA publishes its own unduplicated headcount, and on that measure women are 40.70 percent of athletes (266,269 of 654,196), 1.39 points lower. The headline is not an artifact of double counting. Switching to the stricter measure makes it slightly worse.

Substantial proportionality is one of three ways to satisfy Title IX, not the test itself. An institution can comply through Prong 2, a history and continuing practice of program expansion for the underrepresented sex, or through Prong 3, fully and effectively accommodating that sex's interests and abilities. EADA measures neither. There is nothing in the file about interest surveys, unmet demand, or the sequence in which teams were added. A college sitting 18 points off proportionality may be in full compliance, and nothing in this data can say otherwise.

"Substantially proportionate" also has no fixed numeric threshold. The 1-point and 5-point bands used later in this post are analytic conveniences chosen so the distribution has visible edges. They are not legal standards.

Two boundaries worth stating once. The enrollment side is IPEDS undergraduate fall enrollment, not a full-time-only count, which is one reason an institution's own Title IX analysis may use a different denominator. And EADA records only male and female counts, so nothing here speaks to nonbinary students or athletes.

Run the same two shares back through the file and you get a slow narrowing that reversed. The gap was 12.88 points in AY 2008-09, tightened to 10.98 points in AY 2016-17 (its narrowest in the 17-year window used here), and has widened since. AY 2024-25 sits 2.08 points wider than that low. Where the window starts matters. Push the start back to 2005-06 and the current gap comes out narrower than the first year rather than wider; the limits section has those figures. The 2014-15 and 2016-17 comparisons hold either way.

Women's share of athletes has now fallen four years running: 43.09 percent in 2020-21, then 42.49, 42.24, 42.13 and 42.10. The 43.09 percent peak is the least trustworthy point in that run, because AY 2020-21 covers 1,844 institutions and 14,381 sport rows against 2,073 and 17,612 the year before. That is COVID cancellation, not a policy shift.

There is a second reading of the same file that runs the other way, and omitting it would protect the story rather than test it. The figures above are enrollment-weighted national shares. Take the unweighted median institution instead and the gap narrowed, from 13.79 points in AY 2008-09 to 12.87 in AY 2024-25.

Both are true and they answer different questions: the median gives a 200-student college the same weight as a 60,000-student university. Shortening the window removes the ambiguity. Since 2014-15 the two measures move together. The median institution gap widened from 12.14 to 12.87 points, the share of institutions within 5 points of proportionality fell from 21.4 percent to 19.0 percent, and the share 20 or more points short rose from 21.3 percent to 22.0 percent.

A national figure says nothing about how institutions sit around it. The spread is where the useful information is. The median institution is 12.87 points off proportionality, the quartiles are 6.16 and 19.23 points, and the 90th percentile is 25.80.

Only 77 of 2,037 institutions, 3.8 percent, are within a point either way. The modal institution is 15 to 20 points short: 405 of them, 19.9 percent of the file.

Women are the underrepresented sex at 1,877 institutions and men at 159, with one institution landing exactly on zero. The 159 cluster in the four-year sectors, at 58 public four-years (9.8 percent of that sector) and 67 private nonprofit four-years (8.1 percent).

This is the first objection any quantitative reader raises, so it gets a query rather than a hedge. Football carried 100,489 male participants at 876 institutions in AY 2024-25 and zero female participants. That is 22.7 percent of all male roster spots in the country.

Delete every one of those participants from the national count and women rise from 42.10 percent of athletes to 48.45 percent. Against a 55.15 percent enrollment share, that still leaves 6.70 points. The football-free gap widened too, from 4.45 points in 2014-15.

The stronger test deletes nothing. 1,161 of the 2,037 filers sponsor no football at all. At those colleges women are 56.36 percent of undergraduates and 45.76 percent of athletes, a 10.59 point gap with no football anywhere in the denominator. At the 876 that do sponsor it the gap is 14.34 points, falling to 4.08 once football participants come out.

So football explains most of the gap at the schools that play it and none of it at the majority that do not. EADA also lets you hold division constant and vary only football sponsorship: NCAA Division II runs 18.23 points with football and 10.26 without, a difference of 7.97, and Division III runs 14.80 against 10.50, a difference of 4.30.

Break the file by athletic classification and the ordering runs backwards from the intuition that big-time football programs carry the worst numbers. Among classifications with 20 or more institutions, the two narrowest gaps are NCAA Division I without football at 5.49 points and NCAA Division I-FBS at 5.59. The division that plays the most expensive football in the country is second closest to proportionality.

The widest are NJCAA Division III at 22.15 points across 92 institutions, NCAA Division II with football at 18.23, NJCAA Division I at 16.96, NAIA Division I at 16.66, the California community college association at 16.59 and NJCAA Division II at 16.29. Junior colleges and small four-years, not flagships.

By sector the same shape appears: public two-year colleges run 6.77 points wider than public four-years.

Geography adds a factor of roughly two. Among the 34 states with 20 or more EADA filers, Mississippi is widest at 22.13 points across 31 institutions and Colorado narrowest at 9.88 across 21. All 34 show women underrepresented in athletics relative to enrollment. There is no state where the arithmetic comes out the other way. If you are assembling a comparison set, how to build a peer group covers the selection logic.

Sort institutions by how female their undergraduate body already is and the gap widens at every step. Where women are under half of undergraduates the median gap is 6.11 points. Where they are 55 to 60 percent it is 13.43. Where they are 65 percent or more, across 214 institutions, it is 21.53.

The mechanism is visible in the same cut. Across those bands the average women's share of enrollment rises 27.6 points, from 42.31 percent to 69.89 percent. The average women's share of athletes rises 12.7 points, from 35.49 percent to 48.20 percent. Rosters move less than half as far as enrollment does. That is the mechanical reason the national gap widened while nobody cut a women's team.

Size runs the same direction. Institutions enrolling 10,000 or more undergraduates run a combined 5.85 points across 189 institutions; institutions enrolling 1,000 to 2,499 run 15.84 across 694. Those are pooled shares rather than averages of per-institution gaps. The median per-institution gap in the same two bands is 4.80 and 15.08 points. Ten of the 12 largest EADA filers sit within 5 points, and three of those (Purdue at -2.8, Rutgers at -0.8 and Texas A&M at -0.03, which rounds away to zero) run women's participation above their enrollment share.

The reason is arithmetic rather than virtue. Athletes are 2.80 percent of undergraduates at institutions of 10,000 or more and 38.54 percent at institutions under 1,000. At the smallest colleges athletics is an enrollment strategy: roster construction is admissions, and the sport mix is doing work that has nothing to do with Title IX.

The obvious explanation, that colleges field fewer women's teams, is wrong. In AY 2024-25 institutions fielded 14,531 women's teams against 12,978 men's teams, and they have added more women's teams than men's since 2008-09 (+1,970 against +1,327). The average institution runs 7.13 women's teams and 6.37 men's.

The gap is roster size. The average women's team carries 22.2 participants; the average men's team carries 34.2, or 28.3 with football excluded. Both grew over 16 years and men's grew faster: women's rosters went from 18.4 to 22.2, men's from 27.9 to 34.2. The average football roster went from 96.0 to 114.7, an increase of 18.7 spots repeated across 876 teams.

Put the two sides together and the story fits in a sentence. Between AY 2008-09 and AY 2024-25 the file added 101,241 women undergraduates and lost 24,597 men. Over the same window it added 118,288 men's roster spots and 91,271 women's. Women accounted for all of the net enrollment growth and 43.6 percent of the new roster spots. Read those as file-level differences, not a fixed panel: 2,053 institutions filed in AY 2008-09 and 2,037 filed in AY 2024-25, and they are not the same 2,000-odd colleges.

None of which is for lack of women's sports growing. Combined track and cross country added 22,481 women's spots, soccer 11,705, the Other Sports catch-all 9,301, volleyball 7,243, lacrosse 6,812 and softball 6,270. Wrestling went from 201 participants to 3,445, beach volleyball from 24 to 3,128. The women's side grew. The men's side grew faster, and share is a ratio.

Divide sex-allocated athletics expense by participants and the two lines have been separating for 16 years. The gap per athlete was $2,724 in AY 2008-09 and $7,527 in AY 2024-25, growth of 82.2 percent since 2014-15 and 176.3 percent since 2008-09. Total sex-allocated expense went from $7.46B to $19.16B over the same window.

The ratio reads differently. It rose steadily from 1.230 in 2008-09 to 1.290 in 2014-15 to 1.372 in 2019-20, then held roughly flat at 1.364. The relative gap stopped widening about five years ago; the absolute gap did not, because the base kept growing.

Now the correction, which matters more than the headline. That per-athlete gap is almost entirely a Division I story. In 13 of the 17 classifications with 20 or more institutions, spend per female athlete equals or exceeds spend per male athlete; NJCAA Division I spends $13,057 per female athlete against $10,284 per male athlete. Only FBS, FCS, Division I without football and NAIA Division II run male-favoring, and FBS carries almost all of the weight: $169,087 per male athlete against $66,960 per female athlete across 128 institutions, a ratio of 2.53.

Inside FBS, football is $4.42B of the $7.00B those institutions spend on men's teams, for 15,885 participants, against $2.57B on all women's teams. Strip football out and FBS still spends $101,080 per remaining male athlete against $66,960, a ratio of 1.51. Football is most of the FBS money gap and not all of it. Outside Division I, though, the file does not support a general claim that money follows men.

Sex-allocated expense is smaller than the athletics budget. Total athletics expense across all EADA institutions was $27.63B in AY 2024-25, of which $8.39B is reported as not allocated by sex, against $28.29B in revenue. And EADA revenue is an allocation reported by the institution under the survey's own rules rather than an audited income statement, so treat any revenue share as the softer number.

Read that table for the spread. Athletically related student aid is the closest thing to parity in the file at 44.97 percent, above women's 42.10 percent share of participants. Recruiting is furthest from it at 28.89 percent, down from 34.34 percent in AY 2008-09, and unlike roster size it responds to a decision made this year.

The coaching numbers are a full count, not a sample: summed with a null guard, the four detail columns for coach sex reconcile exactly to the file's own totals in all 23 years. Summed naively they return 691 head coaches instead of 14,653.

In AY 2024-25, 6,277 of the 14,653 head coaches of women's teams are women, 42.84 percent, up from 39.28 percent in AY 2008-09. On men's teams, 690 of 12,972 head coaches are women, 5.32 percent, up from 3.06 percent.

The asymmetry is the finding, not either share on its own. Men hold 8,376 head-coach jobs on women's teams; women hold 690 on men's teams, a ratio of 12.1 to 1. Coaching women's teams is open to both sexes. Coaching men's teams is, in practice, one career path. The pattern repeats one level down: women hold 53.93 percent of assistant positions on women's teams (14,898 of 27,625) and 8.64 percent on men's teams (2,949 of 34,120), and men's teams carry more assistant positions than women's teams do.

Pay follows the same split, with a heavy caveat. The FTE-weighted average head-coach salary is $200,143 on men's teams and $92,252 on women's teams, a ratio of 2.17, against $102,289 and $58,462 in AY 2008-09 (a ratio of 1.75). Assistant coaches run $97,355 against $54,409. That average is dominated by FBS football and men's basketball and is not a typical coaching salary. Institutions employ more FTE head coaches on women's teams than men's, 9,993 against 8,660, so the payroll gap is not a headcount gap.

Holding men's participation exactly where it is, national proportionality in AY 2024-25 would require 545,281 women's roster spots against the 322,383 that exist. That is a shortfall of 222,898 spots and a 69.1 percent increase. The requirement has grown: the same calculation returned 58.0 percent in 2014-15 and 60.2 percent in 2019-20. Note the assumption in "holding men's participation fixed." An institution can close a proportionality gap by cutting men's spots instead, and some have.

Distributed across campuses it gets concrete. The median institution would need 78 more women's roster spots (77.43 before rounding; spot counts round up throughout, because you cannot add a fraction of a roster spot). 160 already meet or exceed proportionality on their own numbers, 327 are within 25 spots, and 869 would need more than 100.

Everything above comes from the EADA sport-level and institution-level files, academic years 2008-09 through 2024-25, queried on 28 August 2026. AY 2024-25 is the most recent collection in the warehouse.

The series cannot start before AY 2005-06, and that part is not a judgment call. ef_male_count is null on all 15,479 rows in AY 2004-05 and ef_total_count on all 17,357 rows in AY 2003-04, so the enrollment side of the ratio does not exist. Participation is broken in the same era: the national sums for AY 2002-03 and AY 2003-04 come back as 26,527 and 9,032 male participants.

Starting at AY 2008-09 rather than AY 2005-06 is a judgment call, and it flatters the trend. AY 2005-06 through AY 2007-08 are fully populated on both sides of the ratio and return gaps of 13.76, 13.67 and 13.29 points. Measured from that start, the AY 2024-25 gap of 13.05 is 0.71 points narrower than the first year rather than wider. We kept the 2008-09 window because every other series in this post (expense, rosters, coaching, pay) runs on it, and mixing start years across sections would be worse. It is a convention, not a data limit. The two comparisons this post leans on, 13.05 against 11.37 in 2014-15 and against the 10.98 low in 2016-17, survive either choice.

Three limits on scope. Institutions with no intercollegiate athletics program do not file, so 2,037 institutions is not the universe of American colleges. AY 2020-21 is a COVID year covering 1,844 institutions and 14,381 sport rows; it appears in tables here but is never treated as a turning point. And EADA carries two sex categories, which is a property of the collection.

One thing we deliberately did not run: a list of the institutions with the widest gaps. The query is trivial, but a proportionality gap is not a compliance finding, and a worst-offenders list would turn an IR piece into an advocacy piece. For when the next collection lands, the federal data release calendar has the full year.

Analysis of the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act data collection, US Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Education, academic years 2008-09 through 2024-25. Enrollment counts inside EADA are IPEDS undergraduate fall enrollment. Background on the Title IX three-part test from the Department of Education. Data accessed 28 August 2026; see the EADA data source page for what is loaded and when it refreshes. Full reproducible query log: docs/data-evidence/women-are-55-percent-of-students-and-42-percent-of-athletes/queries.md, with table and column definitions in schema.md alongside it.