The Heritage Foundation is at it again.
You remember Project 2025? The Heritage Foundation’s governing wish list, the one every conservative candidate pretended to not know about while on the campaign trail, and then immediately started implementing once in office? The playbook called for eliminating the Department of Education (check), ending DEI (check), replacing tens of thousands of career civil servants with political appointees (check), defunding Planned Parenthood (check), and banning no-fault divorce (working on it). It painted a vision of the American family so narrow that even Norman Rockwell’s paintings wouldn’t pass muster.
The same geniuses (derogatory) behind that 900 page plan have published a new report: “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity.” It’s a 42-minute read and is authored by Scott Yenor, who chairs something called the American Citizenship Initiative. In it, he argues that fifty years of women’s sports policy has really been a covert feminist project to turn girls into little Simone de Beauvoirs with subpar fertility. His fix is to unwind the whole thing.
Here’s a quick refresher on what Title IX is: it’s a one sentence statute, passed in 1972, that states that no person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from any federally funded education program. Congress barely talked about sports when they wrote it, and it passed with almost no objection (which is noteworthy because I can’t help but think it would be DOA today). It became a sports law almost by accident, because athletics were the most visible place schools were shutting girls out entirely. Once schools had to take it seriously, the numbers of girls participating in athletics skyrocketed from around three hundred thousand in the early seventies to 1.8 million by the mid eighties. I guess that’s what happens when you stop locking half the student body out of the gym.
Heritage’s report tells a different story. It claims Title IX was a tool of feminist social engineering, forcing schools to chase artificial parity in athletic numbers regardless of what students actually want to play. It points to “research” showing men report more interest in competitive contact sports on average, and argues that the quest for equality has done two things at once: pushed women’s sports toward a hyper competitive model most women never asked for, and gutted men’s programs like wrestling and gymnastics to make the ratios work. The solution, according to them, is to stop pursuing equal inclusion, and treat any gap in interest between men and women as natural rather than something schools are required to close.
There’s also a claim buried in the droning text that intense athletic conditioning wrecks women’s fertility, so a gentler model, perhaps activities like the Girls Scouts do (I’m not even kidding), would be better for them:
I can’t make this shit up.
They’re arguing playing basketball will drive women to not have babies. It won’t. Ironically, highly misogynistic and inequitable cultures are the largest contributing factor to the declining birth rate. Want more babies? Men don’t have to dismantle women’s sports, they literally just have to stop being assholes.
For years, this same crowd ginned up the masses by decrying that women and girls in sports need protection from trans people. Jessica Anderson, former executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to Heritage Foundation, argued that letting transgender athletes onto women’s teams puts them “under threat of being erased entirely.” And now, the same people turn around and argue girls don’t need or deserve equal presence in sports in the first place. The self-appointed protectors are now carrying their precious lambs to the slaughter, and the masses, already having been trained on how to terrorize the most vulnerable, won’t stand up or in the way.
I’d laugh at their trickery if it wasn’t so dangerously effective, or if we weren’t living through one of the most dangerous times for women and girls. The reason Heritage feels emboldened to spew this nonsense is because powerful people and institutions who should be above the culture wars are allowing themselves to be played like fiddles. Take DEI for example. Bloomberg reported this month that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is ending a women’s scholarship this fall. Middlebury killed a program worth up to twenty five thousand dollars a year for female students. Duke opened a scholarship named after its first Woman’s College dean to students of all genders. Palantir and Google have both dropped programs meant to boost female representation. These institutions saw where the political wind was blowing, and were all too happy to preemptively comply. They didn’t have to do any of this. And yet, here we are.
Here’s what they and the Heritage Foundation, and any person who champions legalizing discrimination should know: rolling back Title IX won’t hand young men a single new opportunity they didn’t already have. Cutting the girls rowing roster won’t strengthen the men’s wrestling team. Men aren’t falling behind because women finally got to where they should have been all along. All of these grievances trace back to the same zero-sum con that powerful men have been peddling for years: if men want more opportunity, we have to take opportunity away from women. That’s a lie. Making girls second class citizens again won’t make America great. Standing up to men who are obsessed with making women small will.
In case you missed it…
My phone blew UP on Monday evening! No, It wasn’t my birthday. I was just on PBS News Hour with my friend and fellow executive producer Tan France, and I was thrilled to learn within seconds how many folks tuned in and spotted us live!
We had a fantastic conversation with Amna Nawaz about our documentary No Country for Mothers.
I’ve been saying for a while now that this film is an investigation into the lies we tell about American motherhood, the ones designed to distract us and keep us divided instead of fighting for what actually makes motherhood tenable here like paid leave and childcare. We’ve been tricked into thinking our only options are tradwife or girlboss, when really most of us just want something in between.
I told Amna about how, in that regard, the pandemic gave us a strange kind of gift. For a minute, we saw better paid leave policies, remote work, and actual grace extended to mothers. And then we watched it all get pulled back the moment things went back to “normal.” Companies like Deloitte and Zoom recently walked back paid leave benefits, even though we know they are a good business decision. Last year alone, half a million women left the workforce because they had kids under five and couldn’t find or afford childcare.
Tan brought something I really valued to this project, an outside perspective from a country that does this differently, and a reminder that dads and non-mothers have a stake in fixing this too. I’m so grateful for his support and belief in this project.
We also talked about why we didn’t sell this film to a streamer. No Netflix, no YouTube. Just community screenings, over a thousand of them so far, because I didn’t want moms watching this alone in their living rooms thinking it’s their own fault they can’t make it work. I wanted them watching it together, in libraries and church basements and rented out theaters, and speak with each other honestly about the state of motherhood in America and what we’re going to do about it. It takes community to build a movement, and the one we are building is going to change things, once and for all.
“We want our country to be great. It starts with taking care of our mothers and our children.” - Tan France
Watch out full conversation here, and let me know what you think.
While you’re here…
Huge thanks to Jennifer Jay Palumbo and Forbes for their piece this week on Moms First’s Foundational Workers Report, with analysis by McKinsey, which found that child care breakdowns cost U.S. businesses up to $70 billion a year. And the shocks of the broken system hit hardest on foundational workers, nurses, teachers, retail and hospitality staff, the people whose jobs don’t come with a “work from home” option when the sitter cancels.
Molly Day, our COO, said it best, “Too many mothers are carrying the weight of a system that wasn’t built to support them.”
The piece walks through what’s actually working for employers (backup care, predictable scheduling, childcare stipends), and makes the case I’ve been making for years. This isn’t a mom problem. It’s a business problem, and the companies that figure that out first are going to win.
Last week’s Here’s the Thing
Women are damned if we AI do, damned if we AI don’t.
Work has never worked for women and people of color, so don't ask us to get excited about the future of work before you've fixed the present of it.
Wow... "Service" and "Character" are distinctly feminine virtues? He apparently doesn't think very highly of his own gender. Or maybe he knows something we don't?