Seventeen former and current women athletes at San Diego State University have filed a class-action lawsuit charging the university with sex discrimination for not adhering to Title IX guidelines requiring gender equality in college sports.
According to the plaintiffs, in the 2019-20 academic year, women were 58.12 percent of the student athletes at the university but received only 50.57 percent of the athletic financial aid. In the 2020-21 academic year, women were 57.22 percent of the student athletes but got 50.64 percent of the aid money. The suit claims that if equality had prevailed, women would have received an additional $1.2 million in aid over the two-year period.
Arthur H. Bryant, lead counsel for the women plaintiffs, stated that “San Diego State University has been openly violating Title IX by depriving its female student athletes of equal athletic financial aid for over a decade. The reports it has filed with the federal government show that, since at least 2010, SDSU has been cheating its women athletes out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in equal athletic financial aid each year. This is illegal sex discrimination, plain and simple. It has to stop.”