Muffet McGraw's comments on gender equity in sports, business

For god's sake, if I didn't have any more consistency in my beliefs than that, you would have every right to point and snicker.

 

Comparing the percentage of women coaching women's college basketball before and after Title IX may actually be worse than comparing the statistics of NFL quarterbacks and wide receivers from before the rule changes in 1978 that opened up the passing game to today. The game changed that much.

If the Longman didn't know that when writing the piece, that's lousy reporting. If Longman did know it, using the statistic was intentionally misleading.

 

So, because the game somehow changed, fewer women are coaches? Are they not capable of coaching the modern game?

You're going to have to explain your argument a lot more than scoffing at a steep decline in female coaches and saying the game has changed.

 

Before Title IX, almost every WBB program was a club-level sport, taught by faculty-level phys ed instructors. The elevation of programs to varsity status, and the corresponding increase in salaries, made it possible to make a living solely as a coach. That opened up the candidate field to many more men than before, when they had to be a degree-holding (generally an MA at least) university faculty member to coach the old club team.

 

Exactly. Once the schools had to spend money on those teams, they started hiring men because it was the '70s our society was even more sexist than it is now. A comparison of the number of female coaches a few years after Title IX to now would be far more useful, but it wouldn't fit the narrative in Longman's story.

 

Title IX has been in place for 47 years. Even accounting for the rapid hiring of men to replace women over the next decade or two, that's still two decades for it to go back towards women. It hasn't.

Why aren't these schools hiring women now? You're fixated on the semantics about the start of the problem rather than the fact that the problem still exists.

 

That was almost 50 years ago. It's still a problem today.

A normal curve would have seen the numbers dip as men get hired in the 70s and 80s and then climb back up in the last 20 years. It hasn't. Therefore, whatever the circumstances were at its origin in the 70s, it's a problem that needs addressed today.

 

I worked with someone who hates Joanne P. McCallie for the same reason

 

I'm not fixated on any one part of it. I'm pointing out a serious flaw in the article. It begins with a misleading premise that shows either a lack of understanding of what women's sports were like before Title IX or an intentional decision by the writer to manipulate the narrative dishonestly. This is a site for current and past journalists. That should matter here.

Of course, it is an issue that more women aren't coaching women's sports. I wrote about this subject multiple times when I was a sports journalist. In the '90s, I wrote something about the impact of Title IX and about 10 years later, I wrote a story about men still dominating coaching jobs in women's basketball at the college and high school levels. The women I spoke to said it wasn't so simple as sexism. Even they felt women hadn't been given the opportunity to develop their knowledge of the game on a fair playing field before Title IX. So even at the turn of the century, we were only about one generation into that era and the pool of qualified women coaches was still growing. That is why it would be better to compare things a few years after Title IX. Maybe mark where the number was by decade. It is a worthwhile discussion and there is a problem, but the best way to do that is to start from a position of honesty. Comparing the numbers before Title IX, when most of the programs were clubs, to the current situation is not fair or accurate.

 

Do you actually know how the numbers compare if you took 1979 and 1989, then see where things are today? Those numbers aren't in the article and they should be. That was my point all along.

 

Longman used Title IX as the barometer because that was the landmark date.

But the very report he cited has data all the years in between. Here's the full PDF -
http://www.acostacarpenter.org/2014...egiate Sport -37 Year Update - 1977-2014 .pdf

Here are the numbers you wanted: In 1980, the percentage of female coaches was 54.2%. In 1990, it was 47.3%. By 2000, it was 45.6%. And by 2014, the year this was issued, it was 43.4%.

All of this has occurred at a time when more girls are participating in sports than ever before and more teams are being sponsored at all three levels of college sports.

The fact that the percentage continues to decline is a huge problem.

 

Agreed. And those are the numbers Longman should have used. Those are the numbers that provide a fair and accurate view of the issue, but the pre-Title IX numbers are more sensational, so that's what ran. That was my issue all along. I hope you finally caught on to that.

I have written about the issue of men still taking up far too many jobs coaching women's sports before. I don't mean here. I mean professionally. The real and relevant numbers are damning enough. When you do something misleading like Longman did, that doesn't help at all because it's easy to dismiss.