"Discerning the true intent of advocates of women's sports programs is particularly important because of the success of such advocates in dramatically expanding the size of these programs. In 1972, fewer than 300,000 high-school girls participated in competitive sports and fewer than 32,000 women competed in intercollegiate sports. In contrast, during the 2000-01 academic year, 2.78 million high-school girls participated in sports and over 150,000 women participated in college sports.

...As journalist Mike Fish acknowledges, the question of 'sexual orientation lurks under the surface in women's athletics.' And on the college level, more than a few observers have alleged that lesbianism in women's athletics is 'pervasive and extensive.' When, for instance, Rick Majerus, the coach for the University of Utah men's basketball team, complained in 1989 about the ubiquity of lesbians in women's basketball, progressive commentators roundly criticized him for his lack of political sensitivity. No one questioned his eyesight. Indeed, in the vehemence with which they attack 'homophobia in women's athletics' and the bitterness with which they complain about how 'focusing on sexual orientation denies women opportunities in sports' feminists betray the undeniable reality: lesbianism is a large part of women's athletics, especially on the college and professional levels.

Feminist groups mock 'parents [who] worry that athletics might influence their daughter to become lesbians.' But, as one recruiter for women's athletics has frankly admitted, the influence of lesbianism in some women's athletic programs is so strong that parents 'would be shocked if they knew.'  'You either walk away or accept it,' the recruiter told the Milwaukee Journal. 'It's not about the coach being gay; it's about whether your teammates are and whether they're going to come after you. If you're around this four years nonstop, there is a certain amount of pressure. It's one thing to come out [as a homosexual], another to have a gauntlet of lesbians leading you down the path.'  Even if lesbian teammates do not try to seduce them, young women going into college-level or professional athletics may well find themselves accepting lesbianism as normal and morally acceptable."

(Source: Bryce Christensen, "Making women warriors: The Anti-family Agenda at Work in Women's Athletics," The Family in America, Volume 17, Number 06, June 2003; http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia_1706.htm#Making%20women%20warriors.)

"Sheryl Swoopes, the three-time most valuable player of the W.N.B.A., announced yesterday that she is gay. Encouraged by an endorsement she received from a cruise line that caters to lesbians, she said she felt as if a burden had been lifted.

'Hopefully, this will not have a negative effect on the W.N.B.A.,' Swoopes said. 'Me coming out does not change what the W.N.B.A. stands for as a basketball league. I don't think there's any secret that the huge support we get comes from the gay and lesbian community....'

Two other W.N.B.A. players have said they were gay and have come out - Michele Van Gorp, who came out in 2004 when she played with the Minnesota Lynx, and Sue Wicks, who did so when she was a player for the Liberty."

(Source:  Liz Robbins, "Swoopes Says She Is Gay, and Exhales," The New York Times, October 27, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/sports/basketball/27swoopes.html?th&emc=th .) )

Although women today enjoy equal opportunity in the workplace, family obligations may limit their participation in the workplace and thus their earnings. Not pleased with this outcome, the equity police are redirecting their investigations away from the office and into the private domain of the home, as reflected in an Indiana study by sociologists Carla Shirley and Michael Wallace. Quantifying what they consider an unfair "gendered division" of domestic labor, they find that women's greater duties at home not only hurt their earnings, but also boost that of men.

The researchers analyzed data from the 1996 Indiana Quality of Employment Survey, focusing on the 437 respondents who were working and were either married or cohabiting, and comparing the results to the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey after which the Indiana survey was patterned. While they discovered that women are doing less domestic work than they did twenty years ago, their total domestic workload (childcare and housework) still far exceeds that of men's. Moreover, they found that the earnings of women, but not men, were inversely related to their time spent on housework and childcare (p <. 10 for both variables).

In addition, the earnings of husbands were significantly affected by their wives' employment, not vice versa. The more the wife worked outside the home, the less the husband earned (p <. 01), although the variation in wives' employment hours showed that only full-time work exerted this effect, whereas part-time work actually increased the husband's earnings. However, among non-working class women, relative to working class women, having an employed husband lowered their earnings, suggesting what the researchers concede are "obstacles to the dual-career aspirations of non-working class couples."

Disappointed that these gender dynamics show little change since 1977, the researchers lament: "Gender inequality in domestic work [still] perpetuates the gender inequality in the labor market." How they would go about eliminating these "continuing inequalities" is not clear, although they claim that "family-leave" policies may not be enough because they reinforce traditional gender roles. Would they support a federal czar to regulate how husbands and wives mediate their division of labor?

As scary as that sounds, by failing to concede that their findings might reflect natural sex differences, or that the family-work dilemma primarily affects mothers who work full-time outside the home, the two sociologists are left with little more than high-handed, statist solutions to achieve what they presume all women want.