In the news last week, South Carolina State women’s basketball coach Audra Smith was fired the day after she sued the school in federal court alleging Title IX violations and discriminatory practices.
This is 50 years after Title IX was enacted. Let’s remember that.
The suit follows on the heels of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that she made in January seeking proof that during her tenure, SC State gave more resources to male athletes, coaches and teams than to its women’s programs, coaches and players.
Smith says she and her players have been disadvantaged by systemic sex-based discrimination. And I love the examples she gives!
For example, visiting men’s teams change in the women’s locker room, the suit says, while opponents for women’s games can’t use the men’s locker room.
On a personal note, Smith says she was paid $30,000 less than the men’s basketball coach when she was hired. She also says was she suspended for three games in February after a school representative asked her to move one of her player’s parents — who were there for her senior night — from court level to their assigned seats.
She believes the suspension had more to do with her FOIA request than with any random seating chart.
Smith has been a head coach for 18 seasons, spending nine years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and five seasons at Clemson before taking over the Bulldogs’ program. She had another year on her contract and was 24-73 in four seasons, with a 4-21 record this year.
Smith isn’t an outlier here. Female coaches say they continue to be retaliated against for speaking up about discrimination.
In a study from 2016, researchers found that at least 29 female coaches and eight female sports administrators had filed lawsuits against their universities. Their stories sound eerily similar: a female coach sees discrimination in the athletic department and takes it to her immediate boss. In return, she receives a negative performance evaluation or gets fired.*
And that’s not where the discrimination ends. Perhaps to avoid complaints, colleges revert to hiring male coaches for female teams. Before Title IX, 90 percent of coaching jobs in women’s sports were filled by women. Today, that number stands at 42 percent. So, 58 percent of women’s sports are coached by men. Men hire men. And since sports leadership is dominated by white males, less advantaged groups — black men, white and black women — have to work harder to gain a spot. **
The Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota tracks the percentage of women’s collegiate teams coached by women. Every year, they release a chart grading their performance.
Just for the heck of it, I looked for the Nittany Lion symbol. And, yep, there it is. Penn State gets a C in gender equality. Only 40 to 54 percent of its women’s teams were coached by women in the 2020-21 academic year.
However, history was made in 2021. For the first time in the center’s reporting, just over half — 50.5 percent — of the new head coach hires in seven NCAA Division I conferences were women. But the question is… is anyone tracking the firings?
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* Andy Donohue, Reveal News, May 9, 2016.
** Statistics from here on are from the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, University of Minnesota, and WeCoach. Check out your school! https://wecoachsports.org/resources/research/#:~:text=The%20report%20documents%20the%20percentage%20of%20women%20in%20all%20coaching,direction!%20but%20is%20remarkably%20stagnant.