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Wyden Seeks to Implement New Recommendations
on Title IX Compliance at Federal Agencies
RAND Corporation report released today
sprang from Wyden legislation;
shows little tracking of fairness to women in Federally awarded
grants
September 14, 2005
Washington, DC – U.S. Senator
Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) announced today that he will seek to amend
the Commerce, Science and Justice Appropriations legislation currently
before the U.S. Senate to implement new recommendations from the
RAND Corporation on Title IX compliance in the awarding of grant
funds from Federal agencies. A report commissioned by a 2002 Wyden
amendment and released by RAND today found that many Federal agencies
do not keep adequate track of whether Federal research grants
at educational institutions are being fairly distributed among
men and women applicants as the Title IX law requires; in fact,
the Departments of Defense and Energy kept so little information
about their $9 billion in annual grant funding that RAND was forced
to drop those agencies from the study. Wyden’s amendment
to the CSJ appropriations bill would apply a number of the study’s
suggested remedies to agencies covered by the bill – NASA
and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“I don’t see how Federal
agencies can possibly be in compliance with Title IX if they don’t
even track the gender of their grant applicants, and Congress
certainly can’t oversee compliance without this basic information,”
said Wyden. “It’s time to make certain that these
appropriated taxpayer dollars are being distributed in accordance
with Federal law, in a way that gives a basic fair shake to every
applicant.”
The RAND study also reviewed Title
IX compliance at the Department of Health and Human Services,
National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
and the National Science Foundation, and found insufficient collection
of Title IX compliance data at those agencies as well. To remedy
this problem, the Wyden amendment would require granting agencies
to establish a database to record information that’s often
not documented on gender, race, scholastic background and areas
of discipline, as well as how much money is requested and awarded
through the grant process.
Wyden, a former chair of the Senate
Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, has long been an
advocate for growing the ranks of American women who study and
work in the fields of math and hard science; the government’s
own compliance with Title IX, the Federal law requiring equal
treatment of girls and women at any institution receiving Federal
funding, is a basic building block of ensuring equality in those
fields. A GAO report requested by Wyden and U.S. Senator Barbara
Boxer (D-Calif.) found that only the Department of Education had
conducted any compliance reviews in recent years to ensure enforcement
of Title IX; earlier this year Wyden received a commitment from
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to help increase
Title IX compliance reviews at NASA, the Department of Energy
and the NSF, and to work with Congress to increase national awareness
of the issue.
Consideration of the CSJ appropriations
bill and the Wyden amendment continued in the Senate today.
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