Why Women Can’t Coach Football,
or Title IX Turns Forty
Forty years of Title IX is upon us, and with it has come a welcome review of the question of women and athletics. There is no question that this legislation was a game-changer. Women and girls participate in middle, high school and college sports in unprecedented numbers. The level of competition, skill and athleticism in women’s sports is significantly higher as well. In my own sport, rowing, Title IX has quite simply created a college rowing experience for women (and the junior levels that feed it,) that was completely unimaginable even twenty years ago. It has literally changed people’s lives, a point brought home to me over the past month as young women I know were named to the US Olympic Rowing Team, the vast majority of them from college programs that didn’t exist when I rowed in the mid-1980s.
But several recent reports in the media have pointed to an important “conundrum.” As women’s participation in sports has risen, the percentage of women among college coaches has fallen. The increase in athletic opportunity for women has resulted in an increased coaching opportunity for men, who are coaching on the "women’s side" of this nation’s Athletic Departments in larger numbers.
Numerous reasons for this are evident. Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi, Associate Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, suggests that a complex set of personal, inter-personal, organizational and societal-cultural issues are at play. She notes, in the end, that this is a failure to see women as leaders. “The current structure of sport and male power,” she writes, “does not get challenged and females remain marginalized and in the minority, and because men continue to dominate the sport landscape and occupy the most important positions, society at large continues to believe that men are inherently more competent to coach.”
