On its “The Ticker” blog, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
Opportunities Abound for Female Athletes, but Less So for Coaches and AD’s, Report Says
New data in a study that has tracked women’s involvement in collegiate sports over 33 years suggest that while more women compete on college teams than in previous years, they are still in the minority among coaches and leaders of athletic departments. Nineteen percent of athletic departments have female athletic directors, down slightly from 2008, the last time this biennial report, “Women in Intercollegiate Sport,” was published. Meanwhile, 43 percent of women’s athletic teams have female head coaches, a figure that is unchanged from two years ago but a steep drop from 1972, when more than 90 percent of women’s teams had female head coaches.
To which I just added the following comment:
The fact that women make up a smaller proportion of coaches and athletic directors than they do of athletes does not mean there are less “opportunities” for them in those positions. Maybe their lower representation in those positions implies the presence of discrimination; maybe it doesn’t. The numbers, in short, don’t speak for themselves, and don’t say anything at all about “opportunities.”
I could have been snarky and complained as well about the grammar of the hed (even though heds are often ungrammatical) — “Opportunities abound … but less so….” So, did the Chronicle really mean to say that opportunities do abound for women as athletic directors and coaches, but only “less so”? I don’t t think so.
But what’s the point of having your own blog if you can’t be snarky on it? At least I behave better in public (something my mother always complained about. She’d have much preferred better behavior at home.)
