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 by earning 73.5 points, down 78.8 from points a year ago.

One of the most striking figures is that in 2016, women held the head coaching job for only 38.8 percent of all women’s athletic teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. In the NCAA’s Division I and Division II, women were less than half of all assistant coaches of women’s teams.

Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES and the lead author of the report, stated that “while there was some improvement for women as athletic administrators, it was negatively balanced by the fact that 45 years after the passage of Title IX, more than 60 percent of all women’s teams are still coached by men.”

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

• Women are 43.6 percent of all students athletes at NCAA institutions.
• Less than 10 percent of all athletics directors at NCAA Division I institutions are women.
• 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 2016 Racial and Gender Scorecard: College Sport, can be downloaded by clicking here.