The main purpose of this survey was to generate information about the state of gender equity in intercollegiate athletics during the 1995-1996 year and to publish this information on an institution by instution basis.
Are U.S. women receiving a fair share of the opportunities in intercollegiate athletics? The 25-year-old debate and discussion on this question has been heavy with controversy and light on facts. Indeed, the facts were unavailable to the public until the publication of the NCAA's first Gender Equity Report in 1992. A limitation of this report, however, was that it presented aggregate data, which did not allow the public to view the performance of individual institutions. This lack of information made levelheaded discussion and analysis of gender equity difficult, and it also stymied efforts to hold individual schools accountable to the law. With the passage of The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act of 1994 (EADA), schools became obliged to divulge participation rates between women and men, coaching salaries and expenses, student aid and operating expenses. On an annual basis, beginning in October of 1996, these data became available by name of individual institution.
The main purpose of this survey was to generate information about the state of gender equity in intercollegiate athletics during the 1995-96 year and to publish this information on an institution by institution basis. An eight-page questionnaire was mailed in February of 1997 to 902 presidents of colleges and universities affiliated with the NCAA. The overall response rate was 85% (N = 767 of 902 schools).
The "report card" format, described in detail in the Data Analysis section, was developed in order to enable readers to evaluate and compare each school's performance in relation to its NCAA Division counterparts. Five grades were calculated for each institution:
- athletic participation
- scholarship allocations
- recruitment spending
- operating expenditures
- composite grade
Our findings suggest that many colleges and universities are allocating resources and opportunities at a roughly 2-1 ratio between male athletes and female athletes despite the fact that women outnumber men on most campuses. While women can no longer be considered token student-athletes on American campuses, they are far from being full partners in the opportunity system of intercollegiate sport. Furthermore, it is simply not true that increases for women's athletics have come at the expense of men's sports programs.
1. Women Athletes Are Not Responsible for the Elimination of Men's Sports: The facts do not support the claim that the increasing opportunities for women's sports in the last two decades have lowered the number of men's sports programs. During the period between 1978 and 1996 at institutions participating in this study, women gained a net increase of 1,658 sports programs, while men's sports programs netted an increase of 74. Only NCAA Divisions I-A and I-AA showed a net decrease in the number of men's sports programs during the 18-year period documented by this study. Divisions I-A and I-AA netted a total loss of 152 men's sports programs or, averaging over 18 years, 8.4 programs lost per year.
2. Athletic Participation: Few institutions provide participation opportunities for female athletes in proportion to the number of women in the general student body. In 1995-96, while women were 53% of all undergraduate students, they were only 37% of all NCAA athletes. Colleges and universities did a better job getting men involved with sports programs than women.
3. Scholarship Allocations: Prospective student athletes at high schools, female college athletes, and their families are being shortchanged by American higher education. The female athletes in this study received $142,622,803 less scholarship aid than their male counterparts during the 1995-96 year.
4. Recruitment Spending: Colleges and universities are less committed to recruiting women than men to their campuses and athletic programs. Women's teams in the sample received only 26.6% ($16,322,470) of the total $61,413,179 recruitment dollars spent throughout all NCAA Divisions.
5. Women's Share of the Operating Expenditures: Men's teams in this study spent $255,050,596 more on operating expenses than women. Women's teams were budgeted $149,909,837 (27%) of the total $554,870,271 in operating expenditures in 1995-96, while men's teams received $404,960,433 (73%). Some discrepancies in operating expenses may be justifiable to the extent that equipment, uniforms and event-related expenses for some sports are more expensive than others.
6. Coaching Resources: Men at institutions participating in this study dominated the coaching ranks in numbers and in salaries. Men held about three-quarters of all the head and assistant coaching positions across the NCAA institutions in this study. In Division I-A, head coaches of women's teams make only $0.63 for every dollar earned by head coaches of men's teams.
Important Notes
1. It should be noted that the "equity standard" selected by the researchers was not intended to relate to any specific requirement of federal law, such as Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972. Title IX requirements are more complex and neither a strict proportionality standard of participation nor exact dollar expenditures are required under that law. Rather, the selection of the equity standard was based on the simple notion that equitable treatment of male and female athletes is a reasonable expectation and, if males and females are not equally represented in the general student body, then it is reasonable to expect that athletic opportunities and resources would be available in proportion to their representation.
For instance, Title IX requires that scholarship dollars be distributed to male and female athletes in proportion to their participation in athletics. The grading system used for this study gives an "A" to those schools whose scholarship dollar distribution is in proportion to males and females in the student body. The rationale for this system is as follows: Should a school that has 50% women in its student body but only provides 22% of athletic opportunities to women receive an "A" if only 22% of scholarship dollars go to women? In such a scenario, the school would be rewarded with a high grade for depressing women's participation opportunities.
2. These grades are intended to reflect a "broad brush" evaluation rather than an in-depth examination of specific line item expenditures. These grades are also best viewed as "general indicators" of the respective educational institution's treatment of male and female student-athletes. It should be noted, for example, that institutions with lower percentages of female undergraduates will have a significantly easier time achieving higher grades than those with higher percentages of female undergraduates. Budget expenditures for recruiting or programming may also vary according to the idiosyncratic needs of individual programs.
3. The findings and conclusions presented here are based on an 85% response rate across all NCAA Divisions. Some schools did not provide all the information we requested or they supplied it in an unusable form. Schools also used different methods for determining full-time undergraduate enrollments, and accounting practices varied across institutions. Finally, some respondents indicated that they sent different information to us than they did to the NCAA. The appendix lists grades for all institutions that supplied information by NCAA division as well as all institutions that either reported information too late to be included in this study or did not return the survey.