After the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights opened a Title IX investigation, Ohio State University has adjusted gender specifications for a number of its programs, summer camps and scholarships that were geared toward women and girls. A professor from the University of Michigan-Flint took issue with the Ohio State programs and dozens of others like it across the country, alleging they illegally discriminate against boys and men.

Ohio State University has adjusted gender specifications for a number of programs and scholarships after a complaint said they illegally discriminated against males.

The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education last year, called into question nine Ohio State programs, summer camps, scholarships and awards geared exclusively toward females. It alleged the programs were breaking federal law because they discriminated against boys and men.

The complaint led the education department’s Office for Civil Rights to open a Title IX investigation involving the university in December.

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In a response to the civil rights office last month, Ohio State officials wrote that eight of the nine programs called into question have or are being adjusted to remove gender specifications or have already allowed for male participation.

The programs include engineering summer camps for middle-school girls, a data science camp for women, Ohio State’s Women in Engineering undergraduate learning community, and monetary awards associated with the university’s Association of Staff and Faculty Women.

Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the University of Michigan-Flint, confirmed that he filed the original complaint. It’s one of more than a hundred such complaints he’s filed with the Office for Civil Rights since 2016, when he first challenged a women-only study lounge at Michigan State University. The lounge was later reopened to welcome all students.

That inspired Perry to look for similar situations at other schools, he said.

"What I came to realize is that this is just systemic across all American universities ... they have a hypocritical double standard for selective enforcement of Title IX," he said, referring to the civil rights law that prohibits discrimination by sex at educational institutions that receive federal funding.

Ohio State officials said the university supports the goals of Title IX to prohibit sex-based discrimination in education.

"Ohio State supports Title IX and is committed to providing equal access to education programs and activities," Ohio State spokesman Ben Johnson said in a statement. "... The university has responded to the Office for Civil Rights, and is working to ensure that all of its programming is gender inclusive."

Title IX was passed in 1972, and the lawmakers and activists behind the law intended it to help tackle "employment discrimination in academia, as well as gender quotas in graduate school admissions," said Erin Buzuvis, law professor at Western New England University, who studies gender and discrimination in education.

The law has been extended to ensure that women have equal opportunity in college athletics, and more recently, it has guided universities’ responses to sexual harassment and assault.

Title IX experts say complaints alleging discrimination against men and boys are likely a "concentrated effort" by some. Even Perry described his work as a "one-man mission to advance civil rights in higher education."

Like with his Ohio State complaint, Perry isn’t directly connected to many of the schools he asks the federal government to investigate. Often, he discovers gender-specific programs by searching colleges’ websites or they are brought to his attention by students or faculty, he said.

Past arguments that such programs were necessary because women were underrepresented in higher education no longer hold up, Perry said, noting women have "demonstrated a huge level of success in higher education."

Women have been receiving more bachelor’s degrees than men each year since the 1981-1982 school year, according to national figures. They’ve also earned more master’s degrees each year for almost as long.

It took longer for women to catch up to the number of men earning doctorates, with women surpassing men in 2005-2006. But women have gone on to earn more doctorates than men every year since.

"When the doors of opportunity were opened, women rushed through," said R. Shep Melnick, professor of American politics at Boston College and author of the book "The Transformation of Title IX."

Similarly, Ohio State has about 1,000 more women than men enrolled university-wide this school year.

"It just seems like those arguments that women are weak or inferior or need some special help or resources, today, it just seems like that’s not a valid argument anymore," Perry said.

But some say affirmative action programs are still needed to open doors for women in male-dominated fields like engineering and computer science.

"It’s important to recognize that Title IX was supposed to remove barriers to education that are based on gender. Those barriers had been in place for centuries," said Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of educational equity at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington. "Just saying that you can’t discriminate does not open these opportunities for women and girls."

Buzuvis agreed: "I think it’s pretty well understood that if you’re trying to help people find their way into fields or opportunities where they’re not represented, that good can come from providing particularly targeted opportunities for that underrepresented group."

While the law clearly states an institution can’t discriminate on the basis of sex, there can still be reasons for programs to help those typically underrepresented, Melnick said.

"So if you have a program that says this is only for women, then you should have to say, ‘OK, why is this justified?’" he said. (But) if it’s in a field in which women have not traditionally been … engaged, I think that there’s a good reason for having that."

But experts said that also means there should be discussions about creating opportunities for men in fields where they are underrepresented, like nursing and education.

"It works both ways — for programs that are predominantly women, there should also be affirmative action programs to make sure that men and boys also have those opportunities," Onyeka-Crawford said.

The higher education community has also done much better at tackling inequality among sexes than racial minorities, Melnick said, "which is discouraging."

Perry said his goal is that universities have separate but equal programs for men and women, or "truly co-ed programs that don’t discriminate."

"If we’re going to address gender imbalances in higher education and target those gender imbalances, then it seems we have to start with the main gender imbalance, which is the shortage of men," he said.

jsmola@dispatch.com

@jennsmola