Wednesday, June 29, 2022 — 7
Sports
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Absence of female athletic 
directors in the NCAA stands out

TAYLOR DANIELS
Daily Sports Writer

The concept of women in sports 
often centers around the idea of 
female athletes. But there are so 
many roles beyond athletes that are 
crucial to the functioning of a team 
behind the scenes. For every school 
and for every sport, the athletic 
director is a role that is vital to the 
success of each team.
And while there are roughly the 
same number of men’s and women’s 
sports programs at each school — for 
example 13 men’s and 14 women’s 
teams at Michigan — there are 
significantly fewer female athletic 
directors in that front office position 
across the NCAA.
That problem is not new — it has a 
long history.
Before the NCAA took over the 
governing 
of 
women’s 
athletics 
prior to the 1982-83 school year, 
the Association for Intercollegiate 
Athletics for Women (AIAW) served 
that role. And in the AIAW, many 
leadership positions were held by 
women. 
But after the NCAA — which 
actively fought against Title IX and 
the AIAW — took over due to its 
larger budget and more widespread 
marketing, many of those roles 
disappeared as the AIAW folded.
In 1973, 95% of women’s athletic 
programs were women-led, but in 
1985 — three years after the NCAA 
replaced the AIAW — that number 
dropped to 14%, and that same year, 
38% of programs did not have a single 
female administrator. Many women 
who 
previously 
held 
leadership 
positions in the AIAW were demoted 
when their institutions joined the 
NCAA. Liz Murphey, a former 
women’s athletic director at Georgia 
under the AIAW, was demoted to 
assistant athletic director after the 
switch to the NCAA. Murphey is 

just one example of how women in 
leadership positions were treated 
after the NCAA took over.
But 
female 
athletic 
directors 
didn’t go away quietly. The Council 
of 
Collegiate 
Women 
Athletic 
Administrators — now known as 
Women Leaders in College Sports 
— was founded in 1979 by a group of 
female athletic administrators. The 
organization aims to develop female 
leadership, advance women in their 
careers and create a community of 
women working in sports.
Its current CEO, Patti Phillips, 
wrote that “cultural and societal 
bias drives much of the inequity in 
college athletics … gender inequality 
in the world of sports has existed for 
decades, and a major contributor can 
be explained in one word: football.”
Chief among those influences, 
football — almost exclusively a men’s 
sport — is the main revenue source 
for many colleges, especially in 
Power Five conferences. Accordingly, 
gender bias when it comes to hiring 
an athletic director — who oversees 
football — prevails. 
According to a 2019 research 
report from the Michigan Task Force 
on Women in Sports, both women 
and men perceive gender bias in 
the hiring practices and workplace 
culture of sports leadership at the 
college level. Women experience 
gender inequity amid a deeply 
ingrained male-dominated culture. 
In sports leadership, women must 
work both within and against that 
culture to succeed.
“I think the perception is (that) 
opportunities are there and processes 
are fair and equal, but they aren’t 
truly whether it be budgets, salaries, 
promotions, or how women leaders 
are viewed and evaluated by peers 
and administrators,” a respondent 
to the Women’s Sports Foundation’s 
Female Leaders in Sport Survey in 
2019 said.
The report also found that the lack 

of access to mentors was the greatest 
hindrance to the development of 
women leaders. While the number 
of women in high-level positions has 
increased in recent years — this week, 
for example, Nevada hired Stephanie 
Rempe as its next athletic director — 
the inequity remains glaring.
In the 2020-2021 academic year, 
only 24% of athletic directors in the 
NCAA were women — and just 14% 
in Division 1. And the University of 
Michigan, which has never had a 
female athletic director since the 
position’s creation in 1898, exemplifies 
that disparity. The Wolverines aren’t 
alone in that regard, and there are 
currently no female athletic directors 
in the Big Ten.
The absence of women leading 
NCAA front offices highlights the 
need for increased female mentorship 
in the sport industry.
In her USA Today op-ed, Phillips 
proposed keys to evening out that 
disparity. Those include creating 
diversity commitments, encouraging 
university academic leaders to join 
in finding a solution and speaking 
directly to men about sports gender 
inequity.
Currently, 
opportunities 
exist 
for women as athletes, coaches, 
administrators, general managers 
and broadcasters that would not 
have been possible prior to Title IX. 
But there is still a long way to go, and 
change begins at the top.
“It’s on us as female coaches to keep 
pushing. It’s on athletic departments 
to keep hiring strong females and 
females in administration to bring to 
light just what we have to go through 
as 
female 
athletes,” 
Michigan 
women’s lacrosse coach Hannah 
Nielsen said in a video about Title IX.
Fifty years after Title IX passed 
into law, change still needs to occur 
in hiring female athletic directors. 
Doing so could be key to expanding 
gender equity in sports beyond the 
law’s current progress.

50 YEARS OF TITLE IX

EMMA MATI, KATE HUA, JULIA 
SCHACHINGER, JULIANNE YOON/Daily

