Women get smaller share of coaching since Title IX

Often when we think of Title IX we think of how this law opened up opportunities for millions of girls to play sports and be athletes. The numbers tell a different story for women who want to be coaches. The percentage of college women’s teams that are coached by women dropped by more than half (from 90% to 40%) while the proportion of women coaching men’s teams did not rise, according to the fine folks at the Title IX Blog who do such a good job of keeping us up to date on current events related to Title IX.

Don’t blame the loss of coaching slots for women on Title IX, though. If college coaches are mostly male (which they are) and mostly white (which they are), there’s probably something about the culture of athletic departments and university politics that needs closer examination. For more details, check out the Title IX Blog post and two recent reports, one on Head Coaches of Women’s Collegiate Teams by the University of Minnesota Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport and the 2014 Racial and Gender Report Card: College Sport by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

The latter reports that 92%-96% of all college athletics directors in 2013-2014 were white (varying slightly by NCAA Divisions) and 90% of Division 1 athletics directors were male, in a country that’s 63% white and 49% male, according to the U.S. Census. Title IX’s work is not done.

Legendary Tennessee women’s basketball head coach Pat Summit (in green) at a game against Texas in 2008. (Wikimedia Commons/aaronisnotcool/Creative Commons 2.0 license)