August 26 is Women's Equality Day. On that day in 1920 the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed giving women the right to vote. Suffrage was a giant step toward equality in the United States, but just a step. The struggle for women’s equality continues today.
We can learn a great deal about gender equity and inequity in our society by taking a careful look at women’s sports. My Dad helped to start a C.Y.O. basketball program for girls as well as boys in our parish grade school in the late 1950s. We both played by the boys’ rules -- full-court. Yet the women’s game did not officially change to full-court until 1971. Women were competing in marathons all over the world, but the women’s marathon only became an Olympic sport in 1984.
The feminist movement and Title IX changed broke many of the barriers to women’s participation in sports. In 1972, at the time Title IX was passed, girls accounted for only seven percent of high school athletes. Today girls account for over 40%. In youth sport, the numbers are even more impressive. Today girls and boys between the ages of six and nine say that they are equally interested in sports. In the early elementary school years seventy-five percent of boys and sixty-nine percent of girls are actively involved in at least one sport. Yet as girls get older, their opportunities to participate decline more precipitously than boys’. The problem is worse in the cities with only 59% of the girls reporting they are involved in a sport compared to 80% of the boys. Some of barriers to girls’ participation are financial; others are structural and cultural. Urban programs’ typically run on scarce resources. Fears about safety as well as outmoded gender stereotypes contribute to an environment that prevents girls from experiencing same the physical and psychological benefits of sports participation as boys.
Shockingly, higher participation rates for female athletes have not translated into greater numbers of women in coaching. Before Title IX , over 90% of the coaches of collegiate women’s teams were women. Now that percentage is 42%, and it is still declining. In 1997 when the WNBA started, seven of its eight head coaches were women. The WNBA added five more teams but now only four headed coaches are women.
Girls deserve the best coaching that we can give them. Qualified males should not be discouraged from coaching women’s sports. Yet qualified women should not be discouraged from coaching men’s sports. Why aren’t we seeing more women coaching men’s sports? Why has the percentage (below two percent) remained constant when the percentage of women has been rising in other professions? The reasons aren’t too hard to find. Athletic Departments have been and continue to be largely made up of men and influenced by “old boy” attitudes, networks, and work structures. Moreover, too many of us view sports as an arena where “masculine” qualities are needed for competitive success.
Among Play Like A Champion Today’s ™ youth sport partners, male coaches outnumber females over three to one. In a revealing study of gender and youth sport coaching, Mike Messner reports an even smaller percentage of female coaches in the Pasedena area. That percentage declines as children get older youth sports programs are viewed as more competitive. Using interview and observational data, Messner argues persuasively that youth sport coaching “remains a highly sex-segregated activity” with little or no change in sight.
As we commemorate the progress we have made toward women’s equality in our country, we need to take a more critical look at sport organizations at all levels. Let’s invite qualified women to coach boys’ as well as girls’ sports at all competitive levels, and let’s make sure that we create and sustain a welcoming atmosphere for them. Let’s get more women involved in athletic administration and in high school and college coaching. Let’s reach out to girls and young women who are denied the opportunity to play sports because of where they are growing up or because their families are poor. Finally let’s set goals for the equality we would like to see in sports and begin to address the barriers we have all too long ignored. As a first step, I strongly recommend that sports leaders at all levels read the 2007 Tucker Center Research Report: Developing Physically Active Girls, which was co-edited by Nicole LaVoi, the Associate Director of the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in sport and a former research associate at Play Like a Champion Today™.
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