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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we head toward the weekend, some of you listening right now may be looking forward to watching a lot of college basketball in the next few days as the March Madness tournament for both men and women will be entering into the Sweet 16 round tomorrow.

Off the court, you may have heard of that a different kind of madness, the disparity in resources that the NCAA, the organization in charge of college sports and including the March Madness tournament, has provided for the competing male and female basketball teams this year. With me now to catch us up on what was revealed in the last week as well as talk about her own experiences covering women in sports over her career is Sally Jenkins, sports columnist for The Washington Post, and formerly a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. Hi, Sally. Thanks for your time. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sally Jenkins: Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Last week, for people who haven't heard this story, videos posted by female players competing in this year's March Madness brought to light some of the differences between the male and female bubbles, COVID bubbles, where the athletes are competing, the men in Indianapolis and the women in San Antonio. Sally, help listeners who aren't as familiar with the story understand it, what was revealed last week?

Sally Jenkins: What was revealed was a pretty pervasive disparity in terms of the basic promotion of the women's event, literally the floors that the women are playing on look inferior and are inferior. The testing for COVID is different, the men are getting a more expensive and more reliable PCR testing, whereas the women have been getting antigen testing, and also the circumstances under which they're tested are different. I talked to a woman's coach who had to walk her team of three-quarters of a mile to the testing site after a ballgame at nine o'clock at night. I'm pretty sure Gonzaga men aren't having to do that at their tournament. It's a range of differences in the basic-

Brian Lehrer: For people who don't know, that's a top-rated team, so they are treated as stars, the Gonzaga men's team players, right?

Sally Jenkins: Correct. I just don't think a men's coach is worried about his player's legs at nine o'clock at night walking three-quarters of a mile to get COVID tested. It's a range of issues, and it's chronic, it's pervasive, the coaches in the women's game will tell you that they simply have really struggled with the NCAA in resources, in promotions, in marketing. It's a range from the petty issue of the weight room that the women's tournament was really, really deficient. It was a stack of yoga mats and about six weights for 64 teams for a month. Then if you look at the men's weight room in Indianapolis, it was really this gigantic, palatial acreage full of state-of-the-art equipment. Things like that. You could go on and on. There's a long list of them.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the weight room disparities made for some star television viewing last week, that's for sure. Is this even legal? When you're getting to the point of not just disparities in the kind of weight-room equipment and infrastructure that's available, but what you described worse COVID tests during the pandemic.

Title IX, as we all know, is the 1972 law that says, "No person in the United States shall be discriminated against on the basis of sex in any education program, receiving federal financial assistance." Even on the NCAA zone website, there's a statement that reaffirms how Title IX requires the equal treatment of female and male student-athletes in equipment and supplies, medical and training facilities and services, and housing and dining facilities and services, to name a few. Do these incidents that we're discussing sound like a Title IX violation?

Sally Jenkins: Certainly, but here's the funny thing. The NCAA itself is not bound by Title IX, only the individual institutions are. The NCAA is actually not defined as a state actor because it's basically a coalition of the individual's thousand and some schools. Legally, the NCAA can do whatever it wants to be pointed about it. They say that they voluntarily want to comply with Title IX standards just like their individual institutions do, but in this case, they haven't.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to open up the phones in a minute, but first, we're going to play a clip of University of South Carolina women's basketball coach, Dawn Staley last Friday. I think we have Dawn Staley. Do we have that clip?

Dawn Staley: We're on the umbrella of March Madness. The NCAA owns March Madness and all of its luxury, then it should feel luxurious to every student-athlete, man or woman. No, we shouldn't be happy with just getting the bare minimum notion. We should not be happy with being second-class citizens when it comes to our student-athletes. Are we grateful that we got a tournament off? Yes. If the men got a tournament off, and they're rolling out the red carpet for them, then that's our expectation.

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough. University of South Carolina women's basketball coach, Dawn Staley last Friday. With that as prelude, female athletes, the phones are yours in this segment. Help us report this story. Are you a former or current female athlete who's had to deal with gender discrimination or lack of respect against your team and your sport in some cases? Give us a call now at 646-435-7280. If you play or played college sports, pro sports, high school sports, whatever women athletes, tell your stories, or ask Sally Jenkins a question. 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Sally, the NCAA as you know has argued in the past that the reason the men's game and men's sports, in general, received more attention, and particularly resources is because it's just more popular and makes more money than the women's game. How would you respond to that?

Sally Jenkins: There's no question that's true that the men will command probably--

Brian Lehrer: You need a minute?

Sally Jenkins: Yes, sorry, excuse me. The men will command about 10 million viewers probably for their championship game. The women will command somewhere between 3.5 and 4. That's a big difference. The men's contract with CBS is a $19 billion contract over 22 years. The women have a contract with ESPN for about $500 million. Again, big difference in revenue.

What I would point out is that one reason why the NCAA is not held to Title IX is because it's not a state actor. It's defined as an educational non-profit under the law. Its aim is to break even, and all of the revenue from all of these income-producing championships, whether it's the women's basketball tournament, the men's basketball tournament, the women's college softball World Series, the men's baseball World Series, all of that revenue from those events goes into a single pot.

The NCAA itself then decides how to disperse that money. They've been dispersing it very, very, very unequally, and in a way that is actually very, very hard to sort out. They blend the revenues. They can tell any story they want to with their bookkeeping, and that's one of the things that has come up in the name, image, and likeness cases that are for one thing before the Supreme Court right now. There's a big tangle of revenue, there's a big tangle of allocations. The question becomes why is the NCAA defining women as a quote, "cost?" Women's Basketball is not a "cost." Women's Basketball is the point.

There's 90 championships in the NCAA, and they're all the point of the organization. No one should be defined as a cost or more of a profit-making enterprise. This is supposed to be an educational non-profit, that's supposed to be maximizing opportunities for as many kids as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Mia in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Mia, thanks so much for calling in.

Mia: Great, thank you so much for taking my call. I listen to your show all the time. I was at Yale in 1970s on the crew team, and we had two women who are going to become Olympians. We were forced, Gail said they did not have the money to give us decent-- We were on the crew team and we did not have the money. They said they didn't have the money to give us boats that were not broken, gyms where we could work out. We were second in the country, the men were 55th and we were forced to wait on buses in February after working out where we were freezing and getting upper respiratory infections, while they had more showers than men. We wait 40 minutes on the bus. We staged something called the Yale 19. We took off our clothes with Title IX on our bodies. The New York Times was there, reported it. The next day we had all three networks there. Miraculously, Yale found the money to get us trailer hookups with showers. Senator John Kerry called us the Rosa Parks of Title IX. I cannot believe, Brian, to hear the story that this is still happening. Just the fact that MeToo happened, I never thought that would happen in my lifetime as a 65-year-old former athlete. That was 1975, and I just cannot believe this is still happening.

Brian Lehrer: Here we still are.

Mia: I'm so glad that women are speaking out at the NCAA. Good for you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for speaking out, Mia. Let's go right to Karen in Rosehill. Karen, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Karen: Thank you. My question is, who are the members on the NCAA making these decisions? The statement was that they're representatives of the colleges. How do they get into that position?

Brian Lehrer: Sally?

Sally Jenkins: NCAA representatives come from various schools, and there are a bazillion committees. If you look at the NCAA website, there's a basketball oversight committee for men. There's a basketball oversight committee for women. One of the things you'll notice is that the basketball oversight committee for men is made up of very powerful athletic directors from the most prominent powerful college basketball and football schools in the country, major public universities.

It's interesting because the women's basketball oversight committee tends to be not as powerful. The representatives on that committee for one thing historically have not been as powerful. They don't come from schools that are as prominent. One of the things that we're learning is that there's been some real segregation within the NCAA. These oversight committees do not communicate very well. They don't work very well together. There's some dysfunction within the organization. Some of the people in the NCAA were not even aware of the conditions at the women's basketball tournament in San Antonio because they simply weren't paying attention.

Then there's another structure within the NCAA, which is the ongoing administration, which is Mark Emmert, the President, who's a hired salaried employee, and he has an entire staff, and apparently, his staff was totally asleep at the switch as well. My question has been, and what I've been writing in the Washington Post all week is, is this malpractice or malfeasance, or is it just indifference? It's a blend of all three, I think. There is just no motivation at the NCAA to do right by women's programs because of the huge CBS billion dollar contract that has that organization swimming so much in cash, that it doesn't have to care about the women's tournament, and it's created a real mentality of, "They're smaller. They're not as worthy."

Brian Lehrer: Beyond the responsibility of the NCAA leadership, which you described so clearly before, is not accountable in the same way as the universities themselves are under Title IX. They are the athletic directors of the individual universities. In one of your pieces, you wrote about some numbers, including that women make up 44% of all NCAA athletes yet among the 65 schools in the Power Five conferences, meaning the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, SEC, and Pac-12. There are only four female athletic directors. Can you explain to our listeners what the role of an athletic director is and how they can influence the current inequalities?

Sally Jenkins: An athletic director oversees all of the sports at a university, they're as broad as, usually, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30, to some schools have even as many as 35 sports. At Stanford or in Ohio State or Michigan, the athletic director oversees the operating budgets of all of those programs, which amount to the hundreds of millions of dollars. The University of Texas has a truly massive budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The funny thing about all of this is, the biggest cost in all of these schools, it's not women's basketball. It's not even the $5 or $6 million coaching salary for the football coach or the basketball coach. The biggest expense, the biggest drain, and the biggest cost burden in this whole deal is, in fact, the salaries of non-coaching associate assistant athletic directors. The bloat, the staffing bloat, and the waste in overstaffing is the real drain in this entire thing. The NCAA really has some nerve to say that the women somehow don't produce enough revenue and cost too much money.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole in West Cornwall, Connecticut, you're on WNYC with Sally Jenkins from the Washington Post. Hi, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi, thank you. I'm calling because when I grew up in Connecticut, I live in New York City, and UConn women's basketball, they were amazing. They shaped me. I still have like Shea Ralph and Rebecca Lobo and Sheryl Swoopes were just incredible. I think as a young girl, a young queer person growing up, that was incredibly important to see.

I'm merely calling because I also was a former coach for girls Lacrosse. I'm really big on like sports for girls, but there are actually three bills going through right now Arkansas, South Dakota, and Alabama, that are trying to ban trans girls and trans women from playing in sports. This is huge, under like Title IX, under access, and the fact that they're specifically targeting girls and women in this, I think just goes into the larger conversation of the way that women's sports and girl's sports are highly regulated, and who gets to participate, and who doesn't. To be real, women's basketball, there's a lot of queer women in there. It always has been, it's a thing.

I think as a young queer person growing up, seeing women play sports, gives this ability of an expansion of gender, an expansion of body, an expansion of being able to do things, and these bills are super harmful. I wanted to bring that up in part of the conversation because it just goes along with who has access, and who doesn't, and how the things are regulated.

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Brian Lehrer: Nicole, what would you say to the people on the other side of this issue, who argue that when you're talking about trans girls and trans women, they are people born with male bodies, they're likely to be bigger and stronger on average, and so might have an unfair advantage in the sport?

Nicole: I think what I would say is that biological sex does not determine gender. Also, I think something that we've seen from women's sports is that this idea concept of genitals, of biology doesn't determine the strength of someone. It's really about how they feel in their body and what they do with their bodies. There are plenty of people with different bodies, like women bodies, or however, they are that can perform. If we look back at Billie Jean King, she beat out him. There is this concept that these women bodies were not as strong as men, and that goes out the window if we think about outside of biology, but really about just gender and expression how people are.

I think there's such a powerful space in terms of girls and women's sports for people who are identifying within that group, to feel powerful and to understand, and there's something really special about these spaces that go beyond just the biology of things, that go more into the concept of connection and togetherness and teamwork, and working for each other. People who are like, "They'll be too strong, or they'll be this." There's lots of different bodies with lots of different genitals that have different strengths and abilities.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get a thought from Sally before we run out of time in the show. Nicole, thank you so much for your call. Sally, I'm sure you've thought about this issue. Where are you on this?

Sally Jenkins: I don't know. It's a very, very complex issue. The problem that I have in any of these discussions is I think we don't have enough research yet. The USOC and the International Olympic Committee go back-and-forth and back-and-forth. There's raging arguments between scientists on this. There's one group of people that argues very much as Nicole just did. It's difficult to see how transgender could be an advantage, in terms of a biological advantage.

On the other hand, there's certainly some concern that testosterone, for instance, might lead to people with bigger hands, bigger feet, longer thigh bones, all of these things could conceivably create a competitive advantage physically, but I don't know enough about this yet quite honestly. We've had a raging controversy for decades about whether sport, in general, should be sex-segregated along male and female. It's a very, very complicated subject that requires thoughtfulness, to politicize it before we have all the science in, before we've really even started to-- We've done the same thing by the way with so-called sports doping. We rush into judgments about these actually difficult scientific issues without all the information in. This is a nascent new subject and I think we need to really, really take a hard look at it before we come to hard and fast conclusions here.

Brian Lehrer: All right. In our last minute for a little bit of fun, as the tournament resumes this weekend, want to give our listeners a quick scouting report on any women's teams or players that they might want to look for as especially interesting this weekend?

Sally Jenkins: Listen, don't miss UConn, Iowa. It's the two greatest individual players in the women's game, the two best scores, Paige Bueckers for UConn against Caitlin Clark for Iowa, the two candidates, two leading candidates for Player of the Year. They play the game like threads of silk. They can really shoot the ball. They can really move. It's going to be on ABC on Saturday afternoon, don't miss it.

Brian Lehrer: They play the game like threads of silk. That's why Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist for The Washington Post. Some of you may know her previous work for Sports Illustrated. Sally, enjoy the games. Thank you so much for clarity on the issues and for taking calls with us. Thanks a lot.

Sally Jenkins: My pleasure. Take care.

Brian Lehrer: Have a great weekend everyone. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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