The UCLA men's varsity swimming and diving team consistently finished among the nation's top 10, had secured 41 national titles in individual events and a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship. Members of the squad have won an astounding 22 Olympic medals. But in an effort to comply with a recent interpretation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Law, UCLA dropped the men's squad in 1993, in favor of newly created women's soccer and water polo teams. UCLA's men's gymnastic team was also demoted to club status, where it receives minimal funding and cannot compete in NCAA championships. This program had produced, among others, Peter Vidmar, the winner of two gold medal and a silver medal at the 1984 Olympics. As Vidmar commented, "the gymnastics team was about second in the country when it was cut, and it had the highest academic average in the athletic department. But apparently these were not valid criteria for keeping the team."

After Brown University eliminated two men's and two women's teams for budgetary reasons, female athletes sued in 1992 seeking to reinstate the women's teams. A federal court ruled that as long as the proportion of female athletes was lower than the proportion of female students, Brown could not eliminate viable female teams. The court further ordered Brown to "balance" its athletic program so that the proportion of female athletes equaled the proportion of female students. Other cases involving Colorado State University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania have yielded substantially similar results.

The "proportionality" requirement stems from a 1979 policy interpretation by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. Title IX itself explicitly states that nothing in the law should "be interpreted to require any educational institution to grant preferential or disparate treatment to one sex on account of an imbalance which may exist" in the numbers of each sex participating in a certain activity. The 1979 policy also overruled a 1975 directive by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that schools examine "whether the selection of sports and levels of competition effectively accommodate the interests and abilities of members of both sexes." But in Cohen v. Brown, the court refused to admit much of Brown's statistical evidence demonstrating that women show far less interest in sports and participate less. "Even if it can be empirically demonstrated that, at a particular time, women have less interest in athletics than do men," wrote Judge Raymond Pettine, "such evidence, standing alone, cannot justify providing fewer athletic opportunities for women than for men."

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