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Home > Recruiting, Retention and Advancement of Women in Athletics

Recruiting, Retention and Advancement of Women in Athletics

By Donna Lopiano

The position of women in the fields of coaching and sports administration creates a tension that all players—including young girls and those who support and mentor them—should be aware of. According to Susan Faludi, author of Backlash there is a “backlash” against the invasion of women into the workplace and women who seek equal rights and privileges (Faludi, 1991). The start of the 1980s was the first time white men became less than 50 percent of the workforce. It was the first time that no new manufacturing jobs were created. It was the first time that more women than men enrolled in college. It was the first time that more than 50 percent of all women worked and more than 50 percent of all married women worked. And it was the first time that more women with children than without children worked (Faludi, 1991). Faludi maintains that the coming dominance of women in the workplace strikes at the heart of male masculinity—that a male will not longer be able to meet our society's definition of his most important role of “good provider for his family” (Faludi, 1991).

This backlash and tension is doubly intense in the previously all-male world of sport. Women have broken into the previously all-male, almost sacred enclave of sport in which males bonded with other men and were very comfortable with their rights and dominance. Unfortunately, the women who led the fight for equal opportunity and those who should have rightfully followed them into jobs in coaching and athletics administration have instead felt the backlash, oftentimes unintentional, from men who are very uncomfortable with giving up this comfortable position of dominance. This backlash has created a very difficult environment for women in coaching and sports administration and great difficulty breaking into sports related careers.

Here are some statistics:

• % of women coaching women's teams decreased from 90% in 1972 (Uhlir, 1987) to 45.6% in 2000, (Acosta and Carpenter, 2002); less than 2% of all coaches of men's teams are women
  
• % of female full-time athletic trainers decreased from 28.6% in 1998 to 27.8% in 2002, a decrease of 10.8% (Acosta and Carpenter, 2002)
  
• % of women in administrative structures of women's programs decreased from 90% in 1972 (Uhlir, 1987) to 31.3% in 2002 (Acosta and Carpenter, 2002)
  
• % of schools with a female full-time sports information director decreased from 11.9% in 1996 to 9.5% in 2000, a 20% decrease (Acosta and Carpenter)

The challenges of attracting more women to coaching and sports administration, educating them to be competent coaches and administrators and keeping them in the business are great. The reasons for these too few numbers of women coaches and administrators are not entirely based in sex discrimination. If we step back and look at the last 30 years, we must be impressed with the number of career opportunities that have opened up for women. Prior to Title IX, women only had two choices for careers beyond the role of wife and mother: being a teacher or becoming a nurse. Those two professions attracted our strongest and brightest women. Nursing and education were two of our finest professions and were dominated by women. And people got outstanding service for very little money because historically, women's work has been devalued and salaries for nurses and teachers were consistently on the bottom rung.

Women coaches, as a rule, were paid absolutely zero dollars for their efforts as junior high, high school and college coaches—jobs they were privileged to do on top of full-time teaching loads. Yet, they approached their involvement in sport with a love, enthusiasm and positive attitude that often is found in its purest form among volunteers. Those who had the privilege of playing under these coaches may have suffered through their lack of technical expertise, but benefited from the opportunity to play and learned the joy of playing sports from these people who coached simply because they loved sport. I suspect that many of those experiences playing for volunteer physical education teacher coaches played a big role in the decisions of many women of my generation to pursue the teaching or coaching professions.

Then came Title IX, which opened the door of opportunity in sport to women and, even more importantly, destroyed the admissions and educational access barriers that stopped women from becoming doctors, lawyers and corporate chiefs. And women took advantage of these opportunities. If people weren't going to demonstrate appreciation of a job well done through good jobs, decent salaries and a rewarding work environment, then women were going to play the game of materialism—and play it well. The crisis in our public schools and the health care industry today is no accident. We created it by underpaying a huge and talented workforce of women. We didn't treat our women nurses and teachers well, so many young women rejected these professions. Now we are paying for it.

Likewise, the athletics establishment gave women who chose coaching as a profession a hard time in employment, promotion and salaries and, for the first time, women had an alternative. They could leave.

It is against this significant cultural and historical backdrop that we must understand why women are not in the professions of coaching and athletics administration in the numbers we would like to see.

Unfortunately, gender discrimination is also a significant part of the picture. You would think that the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, equal opportunity laws and the civil rights and women's movements would have done a lot to eradicate the stains of gender and race discrimination. They have not.

Laws cannot prevent unethical behavior. Laws cannot remove sex discrimination from our society. There is almost always a way to find a way around the letter of the law. Over the past 20 years, it appears that anti-discrimination laws have driven discriminatory treatment, policies and practices underground as opposed to eliminating such conduct. Title IX wrote new rules for the game but the players have learned new ways to break these rules and not get caught.

Gender discrimination in athletics during the 1960s and 1970s was easy to see, label and describe. Men's and women's athletics departments were separate entities. It was not difficult to label inequities in benefits and treatment when the women's athletics budget read $70,000 on one spreadsheet and the men's athletics budget of $4 million was contained on another spreadsheet. Salary inequities were similarly easy to label when women's sports coaches were volunteer coaches teaching full-time and getting nothing for their coaching duties and men's coaches were paid $50,000 as full-time coaches with no teaching responsibilities.

Today, employment practices and discriminatory treatment have become more artful, more deceiving, more difficult to uncover and combat. It is essential that those who work with girls in sports recognize and understand these new, subtle forms of discrimination.

First, there has been a gradual extinction of advocates of women in sport. There were more advocates of gender equity within athletics in the 1960s and early 1970s. Women held 90 percent of the coaching and athletic director positions in women's sports (Uhlir, 1987). They were leaders. They ran their own sports programs. They lost their own departments as a result of Title IX. In the name of Title IX compliance and financial savings, most of the high school and collegiate men's and women's athletics programs in the country were merged under single administrative structures with the director of the men's program taking the top administrative position. Women administrators lost decision-making power, control of the employee acquisition and retention process and responsibility for the development of women's programs.

This change in who hired coaches and other employees coupled with increased funds for women's sports proved significant. When Title IX mandated that more money be spent on women's programs, paid coaching and administrative positions in women's sports became lucrative and attractive to men. Where once, 90 percent of all coaches of women's college teams were women, that figure today is 45 percent.

The women who were once able to promote the development of women's athletics programs and uncover and publicly expose program inequities have either disappeared or are now working under male athletics directors. Many of these coaches, women assistant and associate directors are fearful of being fired if they play the role of a whistle-blower or push too hard for more resources to be devoted to the development of women's athletics.

Subtleties of Employment Discrimination
Some people maintain that women are simply not applying for coaching and administrative positions. However, a close look at NCAA Division I women's programs not affiliated with men's programs and governed by women athletic directors or those programs having organizational structures where there was equal authority of men's and women's athletics directors reveals a very different picture. Sanders (1985) reported that among 14 of 17 such institutions responding (82 percent), only 29 of 102 (28 percent) of head coaching positions of women's teams were occupied by males—almost half the national average.

When searching for coaches of women's teams, the athletic director may only look at formal written applications and make a “paper hire.” When looking for coaches of men's teams, the athletic director will spend days on the telephone hunting for the best candidates and hire good coaches away from other programs whether or not they apply for the position. We cannot underestimate the impact of not “hiring women away” from their current positions. Progress in breaking gender discrimination barriers (or race discrimination for that matter) occurs one person at a time. When an organization hires a woman and has a successful experience with her, it is more likely to hire a woman again. If women aren't moving within the marketplace, even laterally, employment possibilities soon stagnate. There is no progress and major initiatives become necessary to fix the problem.

Women coaches and administrators also confront a very common and insidious underground campaign which stems from the lesbian or unfeminine stereotype applied to women who engage in sport or wish to gain access to previously all-male professions (construction, police, military, etc.). It is not unusual, when an athletic director is checking on the credentials or references of female coaching candidates, to hear concerns that the applicant may have homosexual inclinations or references to her physical attractiveness as being more masculine than feminine. Homophobia is an equal-opportunity employment issue that is a lot like communism. It is talked about behind the backs of applicants and almost impossible to combat.

In many cases, this discriminatory treatment is not intentional. It happens because people are not educated in the importance of ethnic and cultural and gender diversity and simply do the easiest and most comfortable thing—hire people they know and associate with, people just like them. It is easy not to be sensitive. It is easy to believe in stereotypes. It is hard for those in the majority to understand how hurtful these stereotypes are to minority groups.

As long as women athletes continue to have fewer participation opportunities, there will be fewer women coaches because men's sports is still a closed shop open almost exclusively to males. It's also important for those who advocate for girls in sports to understand that despite the fact that women are significantly underrepresented as participants in sports, when the economic crunch facing athletics is confronted, it is not atypical for women's programs to share equally in budget cutbacks despite the disproportional impact of such action. And opportunities for women coaches suffer accordingly.

Another factor is that there is little effort to allow women's sports to become major revenue-producers. All of the extraordinary perquisites—huge salaries, multiyear contracts, extensive media coverage, complimentary cars and country club memberships—go to coaches and administrators responsible for revenue-producing sports. If women's sports aren't allowed to become revenue producers we will continue to see the current reality of women's athletics:

• depressed salaries of coaches because revenue production will continue to be used as justification for salary differences;
  
• lack of attention by the media because no one goes to women's sporting events which are not receiving any promotional effort;
  
• denial of access to major sponsors, contributors and supporters; power connections that can help remedy discrimination simply by their ability to influence those in control of athletics programs.

It is economically irresponsible for institutions not to make every effort to insure that all men's and women's sports are doing all they can to produce any revenues that can contribute to defraying program expense. Moreover, the lack of effort to make women's sports revenue-producers is directly related to discriminatory treatment. Undervaluing and treating the women's sports product as inferior has a substantial impact on athletic department promotional priorities. When a product is presented to the public as inferior, a person's decision to pursue coaching women's sports may also be affected.

The Impact of Discrimination
We cannot underestimate the impact of discrimination gone underground. We have produced a generation of coaches of women's teams who are angry—and rightfully so—at how difficult it is to pursue their chosen profession and be compensated as well as coaches of men's teams. We have produced men and women coaches of women's teams who are angry at salary and employment inequities—simply because they coach women; men and women who are angry at how their players are treated; angry over their players receiving less. This anger and frustration can have tremendous impact on our players, the girls and women who play sports. Do we think for one minute that it will encourage our athletes to follow in our footsteps?

What Can We Do?
I believe we can make significant progress in dealing with this situation. Here are 15 suggestions regarding what should be done:

1. Directly and immediately confront discriminatory practices. Doing this demands constant vigilance and perseverance. We must all make every effort to educate those overseeing the conduct of athletics programs—members of faculty athletics councils and school boards, college presidents and vice presidents, school district superintendents and principals, club sports leaders and administrators—to the new forms of subtle discrimination that are undermining our ability to create an open, fair and supportive employment and volunteer environment for women in sport-related careers. I urge parents, coaches, teachers and others to make a concerted effort to disseminate articles in journals and newsletters that will make people be more sensitive to these new forms of discrimination. Throw the data we have out in front of people who have the power to make a difference. Every coaching association and national sport governing body convention program should have a session on recognizing subtle discrimination and the behaviors and responses which keep women and other minorities out of the coaching profession.
   
   
2. Work against any effort to reduce participation opportunities for women, even in bad economic times. Dropping equal numbers of men's and women's sports when women don't have half the participation opportunities of men is ludicrous. Equality of participation opportunity and treatment of women athletes affects how coaches feel about their profession and how athletes feel about moving into coaching after their participation days are over.
   
   
   
3. Develop women's sports as revenue-producers. There has been considerable debate as to whether women's athletics will ever be able to pay for itself. The real point is whether institutions are making every effort to insure that men's and women's sports are doing all they can to produce any revenues which can contribute to defraying program expenses and eliminating unnecessary expenses. A strong economic environment for sports programs will contribute to better paid coaches, better treatment of professionals and will increase the attractiveness of the coaching profession to young people.
   
   
4. Gear up to sell coaching as a profession or an important volunteer activity to all of our current athletes—men and women. Each national sport governing body (NGB), coaches association, the USOC or the NCAA, NAIA or NJCAA should produce an attractive “We Want You” brochure that presents male and female role model coaches talking positively about their professional and volunteer activities. We need to plant the seeds of coaching as a career possibility in our female athletes. Along with encouraging our athletes to consider a career in sport is the need to educate our current coaches about how they affect the decisions of their athletes to pursue coaching. I cannot remember, when I was in school, getting the impression that my coaches ever felt overworked, under-appreciated, underpaid or angry about their profession. No one ever spoke about these feelings in front of kids. We don't want to keep our kids from knowing reality, but we certainly have an obligation to spend equal time on the positive and rewarding side of our business.
   
   
5. Insist on open and fair employment practices. We must act affirmatively to redistribute coaching opportunities fairly among women and minority groups. We cannot continue to permit athletics to have a closed shop. We must speak out about this issue every time there is a position opening. We must find out who is on the search committee, give them the data and encourage them to act affirmatively. Laws do not prevent discrimination in employment or participation opportunities—people do. Athletes, parents and other relatives, fans—we all can make a difference. One voice can produce change—and we cannot think that the voice is going to be someone else's. We must advocate to our coaches and administrators that this individual responsibility is key to the success of remedying discrimination against women and minorities.
   
   
6. School districts, universities and NGBs must maintain their own data on numbers of coaches, administrators and governing board members by gender, race and ethnic group and must show comparative salaries and positions. Those data must be assembled, published and reviewed each year. These organizational report cards send an important message about the importance of diversity and encourage accountability.
   
   
7. Tenured faculty who have the power to speak without concern for retribution must help women in the athletics trenches who have no such job security.
   
   
8. Educate administrators who are doing the hiring on the importance of invading the marketplace and how this practice actually increases the salary and pool of qualified candidates over the long term. Organizations with successful women are likely to rehire women once the initial employment barrier is broken. Playing the marketplace increases coaches' salaries.
   
   
9. Coaches and administrators need to establish new networks for minority and female recruiting because existing networks are predominantly white male. Never accept the “no women applied” or “no minorities applied” excuse. See what happens when you say “no money is available for a position unless you can find a minority and you can justify this hire under affirmative action.”
   
   
10. Educate ourselves and those working in our organizations on the importance of new employee orientation, support and mentoring in the retention of minority employees—be they women or racial minorities. None of us can underestimate the effect of insecurity and discomfort in the work environment or the importance of understanding defense mechanisms of minority employees. Every intern or new woman or minority employee should have an assigned mentor who knows that it is his or her responsibility to educate and help assimilate the new employee into the organization. The head honcho of the organization has to make clear how important this responsibility is. It is too expensive to recruit employees from limited minority pools and then lose them and have to start over again. It's bad business.
    
    
11. Use internships to create test positions, especially in a bad economy. Undergraduate coaching internships will play a vastly more important role given new NCAA limitations on numbers of coaches. Every organization should have at least one if not two or three internship positions designated for women and minorities.
    
    
12. Impress upon coaches that what they say and do in front of their student-athletes influences those young people's decisions about whether to make sport a career.
    
    
13. Make scholarships in fee-charging junior programs a rule rather than the exception. Sport opportunity cannot be available only to kids who can afford it. Minorities are over-represented in lower socio-economic groups. Our coaches are going to come from our participant pools. We must be sure those pools have enough women and minorities. Insist that every youth sport program charging fees offer scholarships to lower socio-economic group kids.
    
    
14. Advocate for certification of coaches. Certification goes a long way toward preventing employment discrimination because it mandates objective criteria for weighing the basic qualifications of applicants. I still hear that women coaches are less qualified and less experienced even in the face of research that shows that just the opposite is the case. Certification requirements also initially reduce the supply of coaches, which increases demand and therefore increases salaries—all of which increase the attractiveness of the coaching profession.
    
    
15. Be strong leaders and role models. Recommend qualified women for positions. I have never seen a man criticize another man when it comes to whether that man is qualified for a job. Longevity is power. The longer you stay in your position, the more contacts you have and the greater support you develop. Doing good deeds in your community is power. Get involved in community projects and form a power base outside of the institution. Speaking out against wrong is power. It is each individual's obligation to speak out against wrong, for the sake of our daughters and their daughters.

Acosta, R. V. and Carpenter, L. J. (2001) Women in Intercollegiate Sport: A longitudinal Study-thirteen year update, 1977-1990. Unpublished manuscript, Brooklyn College.

Faludi, Susan. Backlash: the undeclared war against American women. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991

Sanders, M. T. (1985). Comparison of various operation procedures in division I women's athletics. An unpublished manuscript, University of Tennessee.

Uhlir, G. A. (1987). Athletics and the University: The Post-Woman's Era. Academe, 73,(4), 25-29.