No sense of entitlement for women

UCLA women’s soccer Coach Jillian Ellis, whose No. 1-ranked Bruins defeated No. 3 Portland in double overtime Friday to advance to the NCAA semifinals, doesn’t have far to go to understand how far female coaches have come 35 years after Title IX became law.

It’s at her desk.

“I have young women that come into my office and I have them point-blank ask me, ‘Will you coach me differently than a male?’ ” said Ellis, who in 1984 enrolled at William and Mary amid the Title IX sports boom. “It’s frustrating. . . . They’ve never been coached by a woman in their lives.”

Title IX, passed into law with the bold notion that gender equity could be attained in schools, including sports, somehow has not provided a sustaining boost for female coaches at the college level.

According to the latest available statistics, the percentage of women coaching women at the college level is shrinking.

And while the number of female coaches has increased slightly since 1972, it is mostly because the number of women’s teams has nearly tripled, to about 8,700.

Dig deeper, as researchers R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter have, and the percentage of female head coaches of women’s teams falls from more than 90% in 1972, as Title IX became law, to an all-time low of about 42% in 2006. Indeed, according to NCAA statistics, which are based on a 74.2% response rate from its 1,054 schools, the number is only about 40%.

In soccer, the sport that has enjoyed perhaps the greatest growth at the college level since Title IX, only about 37% of the coaches are women.

“Even today, athletic directors are not willing to go the extra mile to really recruit quality female coaches,” said Acosta, professor emerita at New York’s Brooklyn College.

“The old boys club?” she asked. “That’s alive and well.”

The pattern was set almost from the get-go.

The first significant decline occurred during the initial six-year period in which schools had to comply with Title IX. By 1978, more schools offered women’s sports, yet the percentage of women’s teams coached by women had dropped to 58%, said Acosta, who along with Carpenter authored the definitive study of Title IX, first published in 1978 and updated every year since except for 2005.

Their research, which was based on a 75% response rate this year, showed that after Title IX, most schools merged their men’s and women’s athletic departments and put the men’s administrator in charge.

“And so when the male athletic director was looking for the coach for a women’s team, he would look to his male friends and ask them to come serve as coaches of the female teams,” Acosta said. “It was easier for him to hire somebody that looked like himself rather than go out and look for somebody or recruit someone that’s female.”

Why the numbers continue to decline is more complicated.

Coaches and researchers interviewed for this article say there is no one reason, although most said sexism, at least in part, has driven women away from and out of the profession.

Ellis, now in her ninth season as head coach with five consecutive conference titles, said recruits who cling to sexist stereotypes are only part of the problem.

Not long ago, she was asked to speak before a large audience and was introduced as “one of the best female soccer coaches in the country.”

“Well, in my mind, I’m like, ‘Why does he have to quantify it with that statement? . . . Why does there have to be a gender tag associated with it?’ We’re so conditioned to it,” Ellis said. “They wouldn’t introduce another top-five coach by saying he’s one of the top-five male coaches. And that’s stuff you can’t ignore because it’s out there.”

Research has shown that such stereotypes, a lingering “old boys club” mentality in athletic departments and a difficult work-life balance all contribute to the declining numbers.

According to NCAA statistics, 81% of athletic directors are male, and the number increases to 92% for Division I schools. Acosta and Carpenter’s research shows schools with female athletic directors have a slightly higher percentage of female coaches of women’s sports teams than do schools with male athletic directors.

Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, the NCAA’s winningest basketball coach, said that when athletic directors are hiring coaches for women’s teams, they should keep in mind women’s limited opportunities.

“We have really one opportunity, and that’s to coach on the women’s side, as opposed to having an opportunity like the men to coach in either the men’s game or the women’s game,” Summitt said. “So I do think we need to be sensitive to opportunities for women, in particular.”

Donna Lopiano, an All-American in softball who went on to coaching and served as the director of women’s athletics at the University of Texas for 17 years, leaves little doubt where she stands on this issue.

“There’s no question that there’s continued discrimination in athletic departments, that athletic departments are the last bastion of sexism in academia,” she said. “I don’t say that lightly.”

But Anson Dorrance, who has won 18 NCAA titles as coach of the North Carolina women’s soccer team, said it is not so cut and dried. Athletic directors are fair in their assessment of the best candidate, he said, but men still have an advantage because of their overwhelming numbers -- only 3% of all college men’s teams are coached by women, according to the NCAA.

“Athletic directors, given a choice between hiring a qualified man and a qualified woman, will almost certainly try to bring the woman in, and for good reason,” Dorrance said. “A part of developing your women’s sports is . . . to give them a leadership opportunity in their sport as well.”

Many of Dorrance’s players have become coaches and done well. Despite such efforts, men still make up the majority of coaches of women’s teams, by far, even in athletic departments run by women. Researchers stress, however, that multiple factors are at work, that it’s not just a numbers game.

The reason cited most often by researchers and coaches alike is how the coaching profession makes balancing work and personal life nearly impossible, something the NCAA’s Committee on Women’s Athletics has discussed at length, said Janet Kittell, the committee’s former chairperson and current associate athletic director at Indiana.

“I think most of us, frankly, that are in this profession recognize that it is not a job but a lifestyle,” Kittell said. “And so there are times when it’s difficult, for instance when you might want to be in a place at Christmas with your family, and yet you’ve got a tournament or those kinds of things.

“So do we address it daily? No. Do you think about it daily? No. I think you think about it when somebody, as you’re walking out the door, says, ‘Have a great weekend,’ and you’ve got 15 events going on.”

Carol Cartwright, the former university president of Kent State in Ohio, recently chaired an NCAA task force to study the work-life balance issue.

“We very quickly learned that it was not a women’s issue and it wasn’t a young people’s issue,” Cartwright said. “. . . The bottom line is that we found that these life-balance issues are important to both men and women, they’re important to people in different types of athletic administration duties . . . and they cross the life span.”

Cartwright, however, said the task force’s study, which presented its findings to the NCAA in January, did not attempt to discern which gender internalizes the pressures more.

In a recent nationwide survey conducted by the nonprofit research group Catalyst, young men and women said they consider balancing work and family equally important.

Achieving that balance, however, can be tougher for women because society expects women to assume “more of a responsibility for the home front,” said Kara Helander, a vice president with Catalyst, whose mission is to expand opportunities for women and business.

That extends to the athletic field.

Amy Griffin, an assistant women’s soccer coach at the University of Washington, was named head coach at New Mexico when the Lobos launched their women’s soccer program in 1993. She coached there for three years before becoming an assistant once again at Washington to be closer to her parents and to have a more flexible schedule.

Griffin, who has two children, ages 4 and 6, said she thinks women are expected to do more at home and thus have a harder time balancing work and family.

Researchers and coaches say another factor in the decreasing number of women coaching women is the fear of becoming the subject of nasty rumors through what is euphemistically called “negative recruiting” -- in particular when rival coaches make allegations involving sexual orientation.

The NCAA Women Coaches Academy, which was started in 2003 to help retain female coaches through instruction and networking, was so concerned about the issue that it required participants to sign pledges not to participate in negative recruiting.

“Some of the negative recruiting that’s going on, that is hurting the profession. It’s not a pretty thing and we don’t like it,” said Celia Slater, who runs the academy.

A kind of reverse sexism also played a role in the declining numbers, at least in women’s soccer.

During the soccer boom of the 1990s, women were actively recruited for head coaching spots as the number of teams grew, but that push appears to have hurt female coaches in the long run.

Randy Waldrum, the women’s soccer coach at Notre Dame, said the effects are still felt today.

“They were putting a lot of young women in those jobs just fresh out of their playing and with no coaching experience. There’s no way they could do anything but fail,” he said.

While there was an immediate spike in the percentage of female coaches, a decline followed as success on the sidelines proved elusive for them.

Yet, the most overlooked -- and, perhaps, accepted -- factor dragging down the percentage of female coaches has been the lack of women coaching men’s teams. Almost all of the female coaches of men’s teams are in golf, tennis, swimming, track and cross-country.

Dorrance and Waldrum transitioned from coaching both men and women to only women, despite what they said was lesser prestige and respect for the women’s game. Dorrance said he tried to ignore the “stigma” that was attached to women’s soccer, and Waldrum said he figured he would never be able to coach a men’s team again.

“Unfortunately in sports, you kind of get labeled a women’s coach or a men’s coach. . . . It’s sad that that’s the way it is, but that’s reality,” Waldrum said. “So that was probably the hardest thing to do, going across that line and taking that step because a lot of my peers were male coaches who were still very chauvinistic about the women’s game and had a hard time understanding why I wanted to make that move.

“You go hang out with a bunch of guys, coaches of men’s teams, and they start to joke about the women’s game, and it’s tough to sit there in that crowd and take it.”

And while there is pay disparity, those interviewed said it was not a critical issue, even though coaches of women’s teams generally are paid less than their counterparts in men’s sports.

Among the schools that finished in the top 10 of the 2006-07 Directors’ Cup, which measures the overall success of athletic departments, head coaches of men’s teams had an average base salary 2 1/2 times greater than that of head coaches of women’s teams, according to data provided by schools to the Department of Education.

Schools in that list included USC, which had the greatest percent disparity of the group, and UCLA, which had the smallest.

Pay issues aside, Slater, of the coaches academy, said bringing gender equity to the college coaching ranks won’t be easy.

“There’s no easy answer because the win-at-all-costs mentality is not going away in athletics right now, so people feel very driven to do whatever they need to do to recruit, do whatever they need to do to enhance their program,” she said.

Lopiano, who is a consultant to the Women’s Sports Foundation where she served as chief executive until a few months ago, goes further, saying that only if there is a major culture change in athletic departments will women gain ground in coaching.

“It’s going to take athletic directors who have leadership, who say, ‘I’m going to change the paradigm,’ ” she said. “The likelihood of that happening, I think, is slim.”

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Numbers crunch

The most comprehensive research on Title IX has been done by R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter, professors emeritae at New York’s Brooklyn College. When President Nixon signed Title IX into law in 1972, more than 90% of NCAA women’s teams were coached by women. Here is a sport-by-sport breakdown over time with percentages of female coaches.

*--* 2006 2004 1977 Archery 0.0% 0.0% 83.4% Badminton 0.0% 50.0% 75.0% Basketball 60.8% 60.7% 79.4% Bowling 50.0% 33.3% 42.9% Crew/Rowing 40.0% 41.6% 11.9% Cross-country 19.5% 22.0% 35.2% Fencing 24.2% 10.3% 51.7% Field hockey 94.2% 96.6% 99.1% Golf 36.8% 41.7% 54.6% Gymnastics 43.4% 38.6% 69.7% Ice hockey 35.2% 28.6% 37.5% Lacrosse 82.5% 86.2% 90.7% Riding 90.0% 82.6% 75.0% Riflery 26.3% 16.7% 17.4% Sailing 14.3% 5.0% 7.1% Skiing 9.4% 21.6% 22.7% Soccer 29.9% 30.1% 29.4% Softball 61.3% 64.8% 83.5% Squash 26.3% 12.5% 71.4% Swim/Diving 25.7% 25.6% 53.6% Synch. swimming 100% 100% 85.0% Tennis 33.3% 34.6% 72.9% Track and field 19.4% 19.7% 52.3% Volleyball 53.5% 59.5% 86.6% Water polo 6.1% 22.0% ------ *--*

Source: Acosta/Carpenter “Women in Intercollegiate Sport”