Despite its positive
impact, Title IX has done little to aid, and in fact seems to have taken away from
providing women with the leadership roles that they deserve. It seems as though coaching jobs are only for women when men don’t want them and it is one of
the most obvious, yet least talked-about forms of institutional sexism out
there.
The cause behind the significant decline in female
coaches is questionable, especially when one examines the abundant success that
female athletes have enjoyed over the last forty years. Take this summer’s
Olympics for example, the United States presented five women’s team sports, and
of the five only the soccer coach was a female. It just does not make sense
considering “the U.S. team included more female athletes than male ones for the
first time in history. Another demonstration of how female coaches have become a casualty of the same
law that provides such large benefits to female athletes. The explanation for
this trend seems simple, the idea that by legitimizing women’s sports has
created a new level of respect, which transpires to larger salaries, but there
has to be more to this issue than just high salaries that attract more male
coaches.
It has been speculated that too often athletic directors
take the easy way out and recruit inside their own networks which is often
male-dominated. The same factors that have kept women out of executive and
board member roles are the same issues dominating the Title IX era. Studies
show that men are more likely to hire other men across various professions, and
sports’ coaching is definitely not excluded from this. Interestingly enough, not a single woman coaches male Division I athletes in a team sport.
