Women Making Little or No Progress in College Sports Administration and Coaching

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida recently released its annual report on gender equality in college athletics. The scorecard showed a C+ for gender hiring practices, the same grade it earned a year ago.

Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES and the lead author of the report, stated that “college sport continues to have some of the lowest grades for gender hiring practices among all of the college and professional sports covered by the respective Racial and Gender Report Cards” compiled by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

One of the most striking figures is that in 2018, women held the head coaching job for only 40.1 percent of all women’s athletic teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Dr. Lapchick notes that “in the 47th year after the passage of Title IX, nearly 60 percent of all women’s teams are still coached by men and 51 percent of all the assistant coaches on women’s teams are men.”

Here are some other statistics on the status of women in college sports:

• Women are 43.9 percent of all students athletes at NCAA institutions.
• Women held 40.1 percent of head coaching jobs on women’s teams in Division I and 35.8 percent of the head coaching jobs for women’s sports in Division II.
• Only 10.5 percent of all athletics directors at NCAA Division I institutions are women. This was down from 11.2 percent in the previous year.
• Less than a third of all associate athletics directors and assistant athletics directors at NCAA Division I institutions are women.
• Women were less than 14 percent of all sports information directors in all NCAA divisions.

The full report, The 2018 College Sport Racial and Gender Scorecard, can be downloaded by clicking here.