The Gender Gap in Coaching
by Casey Barrett
Why are there so few female head coaches?
She was the head coach of the U.S. women’s Olympic team. A group that delivered the finest performance of any women’s swim team in U.S. Olympic history. She’s the coach of the defending NCAA champion Cal Bears. She just signed Missy Franklin, the greatest recruit in the history of college swimming. It’s been a good year for Teri McKeever. She is, very arguably, the best coach of female swimmers on the planet.
She is also in lonely company. McKeever remains one of the few women leading an NCAA women’s swim team.
Of the 49 teams that scored points at last year’s women’s NCAA Championships, only eight were led by a female head coach. Two of those eight – Lea Loveless of Stanford and Christina Teuscher of Yale – are no longer the coaches of their programs this year. Both were replaced by men. This means that about 90% of the teams you can expect to see at this year’s NCAAs will be led by men.
In the water, swimming is a healthier sport for women than it is for the guys. At the college level, their teams aren’t in imminent danger of being cut, and there are 30% more scholarships to go around for the women at Division I programs. (14 for the ladies, 9.9 for the men…) At the club level, these things are a bit harder to gauge, but the girls appear to have a pretty clear majority, in terms of participation.
So, why is the inverse true on deck? Why do so few female swimmers go on to become head coaches of swim teams?
You could blame it on misogynist jock culture among athletic directors and others who do the hiring for these positions. Maybe there’s an element of that. There probably always will be. But playing that card is like playing the race card – it simplifies a complex issue by demonizing one big group.
A better question is why less female swimmers seem to seek coaching careers after they hang up the goggles? It’s not just that they’re not being hired for most of the top jobs in swimming, there also appears to be a comparative lack of female candidates who want these jobs.
Here in New York City, just 20% of the teams (16 of 80) in the Metropolitan area are led by female head coaches. Our own team, the Manhattan Makos, has struggled for years to find as many former female swimmers interested in coaching as there are guys eager to offer a hand on deck. Most notably in the Metro area, Asphalt Green is led by coach Rachel Stratton-Mills. AGUA has long been one of the top clubs in the northeast, and this summer Stratton-Mills coached Lia Neal onto the U.S. Olympic team. In a recent interview with Mike Gustafson on the USA Swimming website, Stratton-Mills addressed the state of female coaches in America.
She says there are more every year and speaks of a need for other female coaches to seek each other out and create a system of support. However, Stratton-Mills remains in the minority among head coaches everywhere. A minority that only seems to narrow as you go higher in the sport. One of our Makos coaches called it a “pyramid structure”, pointing out that there are scores of female age group coaches in club swimming, but as swimmers get older, the coaching ranks become increasingly male.
Until you reach NCAAs, when you can rattle the women off on one hand. First, of course, is McKeever. Her example at Cal alone would seem all the evidence necessary to improve this ridiculous ratio. Then there’s the University of Texas. It must be noted that the Lady Longhorns have led the way for years in this regard. Over the last decade, three women have held the top job at Texas – Jill Sterkel, Kim Brackin, and now Carol Capitani.
Schools with a tradition of academic excellence also might be slightly ahead of the curve here. Last year, take a look at these five rather elite universities who had women leading their women’s swim teams: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Cal. Unfortunately, Yale and Stanford are no longer on that list, with Teuscher and Loveless having moved on, but with the three Ivys and the two Bay Area superstar schools, the connection must be made.
As I was researching this piece, I came across a story in the latest issue of Bloomberg Business Week entitled “The Boardroom’s Still the Boys Room.” The story disclosed that the ranks of female board members and directors at companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index remained slim. These boardrooms are still about 80% male and that’s not changing much. Ironically, it’s about the same number and same stubborn resistance to change among the ranks of head swimming coaches.
In that piece, I came across perhaps the best definition of diversity there is. It came from Cari Dominquez, a former chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under George W. Bush. She says: “Diversity is not rocket science. If you look around and everyone looks like you, and it doesn’t reflect broader society, you have a problem.”
Thanks to programs like Make a Splash along with the outsized Olympic performances of American swimmers with diverse racial backgrounds, swimming has been making big strides in this department. However, if you really want to witness a lack of diversity in this sport, don’t look at the pool, look at the pool deck. On deck among coaches, it’s not just one ethnicity that dominates the population, it’s one gender.
As Dominquez points out, this is a problem. Not only does it not reflect broader society, it doesn’t even reflect the closed society of the swimmers being coached.
Cap & Goggles 
Interesting topic Casey!! Coincidentally I was listening to a news show on the way into work this morning discussing womens’ roles in the ECB, and a general lack of female participation in the upper echelons of the institution. Apparently some advocates are going so far as to propose legislation which will mandate a minimum of 40% – 50% female participation in high level executive and board member positions; a worthy goal of course, but questionable approach which is even being criticized by other advocacy groups. Back to swimming, I share your Makos coach’s observation that the gender disparity seems to widen as age and level of competition increase…an interesting dynamic which piqued my curiosity as well while swimming and coaching. Yet I can’t help but ask how the prospects of moving up the coaching ranks coincide with traditional family structures and womens’ typical roles therein…i.e. being the ones physically capable of child bearing. The road to elite level and/or college coaching seems a particularly daunting prospect for a woman who also wishes to start and raise a family. Often times it seems the road for any aspiring college coach begins with volunteer coaching while obtaining a graduate degree (making no $$), then moves on to potential assistant positions (let’s be honest…not making much $$), and maybe someday years down the road an opportunity MAY arise for a head coaching position (ok at this point, probably doing ok on $$ if you are of the chose few). However, many of these opportunities also require individuals to relocate when ever and where ever they may arise…which is not often and may not be in areas of the country one wants to live. So with very modest financial prospects early in the career track, very limited top end opportunities, and a near requirement to move and uproot a family at some point or several times throughout a career, I can start to see the lack of participation and/or interest from the female contingent when ideas of how and when having a child would factor into that mix. That’s not to minimize the significance of the “Good ol’ Boy” network which also seems to remain steadfast in today’s coaching ranks as you pointed out; how many of the same coaches which were at it when we were in college are still there?! But when and where does getting pregnant and having a kid fit into that whole aspiring coach picture? Teri McKeever, in all her success, is a remarkable coach and an unquestioned trail blazer in many respects, but her personal sacrifices in pursuit of her coaching career may not be something many women want to emulate. Elite level coaching just seems to be one of those professions which almost demands a single income home as the nomadic nature of the job would make it highly difficult to coincide with another career in the household. To that end, obviously in this day in age it is becoming more common all the time for men to stay home with kids, and women fulfill the breadwinner role in single income families. But again, with limited financial opportunities as one is developing their career coupled with what women are faced with in the child bearing process, I don’t see it being a particularly appealing career choice. I have no idea what the answer to this question is, but how many female college or elite club coaches out there have kids? Female bloggers…which is the greater deterrent…male establishment, or potential personal sacrifices?
You make a very important point. As a new mom, I left a career I loved to raise my daughter. I looked back, regretted it, and now I’m a stay at home mom and will never look back again–until she’s a full-timer at school, that is. My job was a desk job, and I can’t imagine how I would have felt if I were in a position that required frequent travel and long hours. I think Casey makes two very important/interesting points–the very simple and true bit about how to tell if you have a problem in diversity and the fact that many powerhouse teams have been coached by women. How to bridge those two points, I have no idea, but I hope that someone’s able to figure that one out by the time my daughter is of the age to be influenced by a coach, preferably in a society/era where there are more women for her to learn from and look up to.
This is a great article.
As a male, one of the reasons I started coaching a female team at the high school level was to make sure that female athletes received the proper strength and conditioning as well as workouts as their male counterparts.
To this day, I continue to higher female assistant coaches and encourage them to seek Head Coach positions. But it appears that we will need to find new ways to encourage females to get to top of the sport.
Casey,
Great topic and one I have been struggling to write a good blog about for a long time. This is a big problem for all coaches, not just male coaches or just female coaches. The fact that coaching culture is built around (largely single) males is a detriment to everybody in the profession.
First, the baby issue: this cuts across our entire culture. Having a baby is almost always a much bigger disruption to a woman’s career than a man’s. I see it at my wife’s work place: a woman gives birth and usually takes her three months leave. The men in the office have wives give birth and miss a day or two, then hit it full steam. Even after they return the women aren’t able to be as “ambitious”, simply because they have to make choices between their children and their job and of course they choose their children because they are way more important. Often men are not forced to make this choice, they can choose to not compromise their workplace ambition while parenting young children at home.
Speaking to specifically college swimming, there has been a token effort at promoting gender equality. In college swimming, this amounts to an unofficial quota on hiring: nearly every combined program has at least one woman on staff, and if it is a woman’s only program with a male coach it is expected that he will hire a woman as his assistant. I feel a great deal of athletic departments go that far and check off their box as if they have done all they can. Many of the people making employment decisions (ADs and Head Coaches, mostly male) will tell you that they struggle to get female applicants to their positions
So what are the solutions? I hope someone smart, with the ability to hire swim coaches, starts using the vast untapped resource of female coaches in this country for their competitive advantage and wins. Others will follow and copy because of their success. The majority of female college swim coaches are young women who have recently (<10 years) finished their own swimming careers. How many great female coaches in their 40s and 50s have foregone their career for sometime to raise families are out there? Think about the experience of raising children could be a huge strength for a coach- after all aren't moms the ultimate coaches? I can think of any number of situations I run into as a college coach where my athletes would be way better off having someone with experience being a mom than me.
Still, I think we are a long way off and progress will be painfully slow.
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Whether we like it or not, a majority of women in the U.S. still want to have a family and committ themselves more to that than a full-time job. That is a long-standing tradition and is liekly why we see the same across all careers. There have been too many women who have made it to the top of their professions to think otherwise (like institutional sexism or they can’t do the job). Women can do a fantastic job in any profession. Its just that most choose not to. On our club the female coaches have no desire to move up to our senior groups as it will take up more of their time which is devoted to their families. Just the way it is. And for those women who choose that route…it is not wrong. It is actually noble.
Reblogged this on Women in Coaching Clinic 2013 and commented:
Casey Barrett wonders ‘why are there so few female head coaches?’
Come to Minnesota – we recently had a Women in Coaching Specific Clinic and are home to three of the best age group coaches in the nation who happen to be women – Ann Urschel, Kate Lundsten, and Olga Espinosa.
The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine
Answers some of the questions about the neurochemistry that impacts women’s and men’s thought and action processes. Men and women are definitely wired differently and certainly account for decisions each gender make when it comes to such decisions as to coach or not to coach.