INDIANAPOLIS — When Birch Bayh pushed in the U.S. Senate for the landmark 1972 federal law banning discrimination against women in college admissions and athletics, women received fewer than 10 percent of all medical and law degrees and only one in 27 high school girls played sports.
Now, women make up more than half of those receiving bachelor’s and graduate degrees and more than 3 million high school girls — one in two — play sports.
Bayh reveled in the impact of the Title IX law in the years after his time as a Democratic senator from Indiana ended.