SAN DIEGO — A federal judge has approved a landmark settlement that will pay former female athletes at San Diego State a combined $300,000 in damages after they sued the school and accused it of violating Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sexual discrimination in the workplace.
U.S. District Judge Todd Robinson delivered the order April 20, approving settlement terms that were reached last year, including $1.3 million to be paid by SDSU to the plaintiffs’ attorneys who brought this class-action suit on behalf of the women.
The $300,000 is to be split among a class of 798 former athletes at SDSU, which might not seem like much. But this outcome marks something bigger, plaintiffs attorney Arthur Bryant said.
“These women have made history,” Bryant told USA TODAY Sports on April 20. “This is the first case ever in which a school is going to pay damages to women athletes for depriving them of equal athletic financial aid. It is definitely not going to be the last. And SDSU is going to comply with Title IX.”
Now that the settlement has been approved, SDSU must pay the amounts within 30 days, according to the judge’s order.
What was this Title IX case about at San Diego State?
The lawsuit, filed in 2022, accused the university of depriving female athletes of equal scholarship money compared to male athletes. SDSU denied it discriminated against female athletes and fought the case for more than three years until agreeing to the settlement.
“SDSU intentionally chose not to fund women’s sports for the full amount of aid permitted by the NCAA’s rules,” the plaintiffs’ complaint against SDSU stated. “It likewise intentionally chose not to permit the coaches of women’s teams to award the full amount of aid permitted by the NCAA’s rules. Those decisions harmed all Plaintiffs. The same dollar limits were not placed on many of SDSU’s men’s teams, including, for example, the men’s football team.”
The $300,000 in damages is owed to 798 female varsity athletes at SDSU from the 2018-2019 through 2024-25 academic years. Under terms of the settlement, the plaintiffs also won benefits for female athletes at the university, including a promise to replace the turf for the women’s lacrosse team and to provide “professional photography services and publicity equitably to men’s and women’s teams.”
New frontier for Title IX cases?
Previous Title IX lawsuits often have sought injunctive relief from the courts – a remedy that forces a school to stop doing something or to take action, such as reinstating women’s sports teams. But monetary damages for athletes in such cases is a new frontier, as the parties acknowledged in their joint motion to approve the settlement.
“It is important to acknowledge that no court has awarded damages for violation of Title IX as to athletic financial aid,” the parties stated in support of their joint motion for approval of the settlement. “The risks and uncertainties that accompany serving as the initial volley of this type of claim were certainly within Plaintiffs’ consideration in the settlement.”
San Diego State noted in the final settlement that the “damages” it agreed to pay are “non-precedential,” meaning they will not be a precedent to be followed in future cases.
Plaintiffs in the case included athletes from SDSU’s women’s rowing team, which the school decided to eliminate after the 2020-21 season. The reason SDSU gave for eliminating that women’s sport back then was that SDSU had too many female athletes compared to the university’s overall undergraduate enrollment, as reported in then in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Five years later, many of those athletes will get some measure of payback within the next 30 days after Robinson’s order on April 20.
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday.com
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Judge approves landmark Title IX settlement for San Diego State women