On November 5, 2025, NWLC and our law firm partner, Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in House v. NCAA. Our brief supports 10 women athletes appealing a settlement agreement that pays out damages to athletes for misuse of their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) in violation of Title IX.
This settlement came from a lawsuit several NCAA athletes filed to challenge the NCAA’s rules restricting compensation of athletes for use of their NIL (meaning their right to control their image, allowing them to get paid for sponsorships or appearing in ads). On June 6, 2025, a federal district court approved a settlement to pay athletes for the money they would have made for use of their NIL. However, this settlement egregiously undercompensates women athletes by using a “market value” approach that bases damages on how much money an athlete’s sport makes for a school—resulting in men football and basketball players receiving 90% of the $2.8 billion dollar award. This means while men may receive tens of thousands of dollars, women might get $125 for each year they played.
Our brief urges the Ninth Circuit to reject this settlement because it fails to apply Title IX to decide how much athletes should be paid. It explains there is no legal justification not to apply Title IX: indeed, the statute’s history shows Congress repeatedly rejected efforts to exempt revenue-generating sports from Title IX just because a school profited from them. It also explains that the settlement will destroy women’s opportunities to access the many crucial benefits of playing sports. This is because schools are using the settlement’s discriminatory formula to compensate their athletes—and have cut women’s sports to afford enormous payments to their men athletes, which is unjust and totally undermines Title IX’s purpose. To read more about the case, check out our blog post.