Sole-Role Title IX Employees: Symbolic Compliance with Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972

Abstract

Sexual violence has been a highly prevalent problem on university campuses in the United States for decades. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 banned sex-based discrimination in schools, which was, years later, understood to include sexual violence. As with any law, decades of the building of social meaning around the law's scope and meaning ensued. Sociologists generally argue that organizations do the bare minimum to meet social meanings of “compliance” with law, and prioritize social appearances over meeting the goal of the law. Here I test that assertion in looking at how universities have responded to a specific portion of Title IX law. Since 1975 schools must designate at least one employee to handle Title IX compliance. Here I investigate how universities have responded to this mandate via an online survey I conducted of 400 Title IX employees in 2019. I achieved an institutional response rate of 33%.I first present a description of the structure of Title IX employee designation, finding that universities have many Title IX employees, and not merely one as seems to have been an operating assumption by previous researchers of Title IX. I find that about 40% of universities have a sole-role Title IX employee, which is higher than previous estimates have found. And while I find that universities more sensitive to their legal environments have been more likely to establish sole-role Title IX employees or have numerous Title IX employees compared to their less sensitive counterparts, these effects largely disappear when bringing in time. Essentially, time is the main predictor for whether institutions establish sole-role Title IX employees. I test whether the establishment of a sole-role Title IX employee leads to a bump in formal reports of sex offenses, indicating a positive outcome. I do not find evidence that sole-role Title IX employees are a substantive structure that move universities closer toward meeting the goal of the law. I explain that sole-role Title IX employees may not be effective because one full-time employee is still not enough to prevent, respond to, investigate, and adjudicate sexual violence in a campus community. I conclude that there is much more work that needs to be done, and Title IX employees need more support and resources from their administrations if that work is to ever be fully successful.