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Viewers of this year's National Collegiate Athletic Association women's basketball championship no doubt noticed that all the Final Four teams had female coaches. Just what one would expect, right? Not necessarily.
Actually, it was the first time since 1982 - the inaugural year of the NCAA-sponsored event - that women held all the head coaching jobs on the final weekend.
The situation points up one of the ironies of Title IX, the 25- year-old law that vastly expanded sports participation opportunities for millions of high school and college women. Contrary to expectations, the law also sharply reduced college coaching opportunities for women. In 1972, the year Title IX was enacted, women coached more than 90 percent of female college teams. The proportion has since dropped below 50 percent.
The trend is easily explained, according to Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter of Brooklyn College, who have tracked the issue for 20 years. One of the first things many college presidents did to comply with Title IX, they said, was to eliminate separate athletic departments for men and women. In almost all cases, the incumbent male athletic director was handed the reins of the merged sports program.
“When the male directors looked for people to fill jobs in the women's programs, they turned to their male friends,” Acosta said. “They'd get Joe instead of Josie to fill the basketball job. It wasn't deliberate. They were just using their natural networking skills.”
In a report issued last year, Acosta and Carpenter reported little change in the percentage of coaching jobs held by women at NCAA member institutions over the past five years.
Debbie Ryan, women's basketball coach at the University of Virginia, agrees. “Men definitely deserve to be in the profession.” she says. “Lots of kids come from single-parent homes, and it's good for them to have the role models.”
To increase college coaching opportunities for women, says Christine H.B. Grant, women's athletic director at the University of Iowa, there has to be “active recruitment of qualified women. You can't just put an ad in the NCAA News and hope you're going to land a woman who's suited for the job.”
Women are reticent about applying for college coaching jobs, Grant says, “because they often feel they're not going to have a fair shot. So the athletic director has got to get on the phone and, if necessary, go to see qualified women and encourage them to submit an application. That's what we do at Iowa.” All but one of the 12 varsity women's teams at Iowa have female coaches.
Diana Everett, executive director of the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport in Reston, Va., says it's all a matter of networking. “There certainly are women out there, maybe in assistant- coaching positions, who are head-coaching material. The difficulty is that the people doing the hiring usually are men. And generally speaking, men don't have as effective a network for finding female coaches as they do for male coaches.”
Charles M. Neinas, executive director of the College Football Association, has his own explanation for the gender imbalance. “I assume there are not as many female coaches as male coaches in the pipeline,” he says, “because it takes a while to develop a backlog of coaches. I also assume that as more women enter the profession and gain experience, they'll move on” up the coaching ladder.
Lopiano is less sanguine about swelling the thin ranks of female athletic directors. “We know from experience that the higher-paying the job, and the higher the competitive division, the more likely it is that the athletic director will be male,” she says. “It's easier for a woman to become a college president than it is to become a college athletic director.”
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