Kirsten McKnight, once a guard on the University of Oregon women’s basketball team, is now an assistant coach with the Ducks. She also is studying for a graduate degree at Oregon, with the goal of someday working as an executive in a professional league.
Allison Gardiner, a competitive swimmer in high school and college, never considered a career as an athlete or in athletics. While she initially became a teacher, Gardiner now works as a manager in the sports and event marketing department of a bank in Atlanta.
Chamique Holdsclaw, who as a high school senior thought she might eventually become a lawyer, is now an All-Star forward in the WNBA. She has a lucrative endorsement deal with Nike and was featured in a television commercial for Gatorade last summer.
It has been clear for years that more women than ever before are playing sports. The number of young girls participating in team sports has increased sharply over the last three decades, as has the number of women playing on high school and college teams.
But often overlooked in the well-documented explosion of women’s amateur athletics and the recent emergence of women’s professional leagues has been a new phase in the development of women’s sports: Off the field, women have begun to build careers in the American sports industry.
Athletes and non-athletes alike, women are finding jobs in universities, in corporations that sponsor sports teams and sporting events, and in marketing, sales, finance and other management positions with professional teams and leagues.
On the playing field, women are finding work in professional leagues like the WNBA, which was launched four years ago, and in a new women’s soccer league that begins play in April. Some stars, like Holdsclaw in basketball, Mia Hamm in soccer and Venus Williams in tennis, have won large endorsement contracts.
Overall, corporations have sharply increased their sponsorship of women’s sports, including teams, leagues, individual events and associations. Last year, corporations spent a total of $1.1 billion on such sponsorships, nearly four times the comparable number, $285 million, in 1992, according to the IEG Sponsorship Report, a newsletter that keeps track of sponsorship spending.
On teams in the NFL, for example, 34 percent of the people working in administrative positions in 1998 were women, the last year for which data is available. In 1994, 12 percent were women, according to the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, which has been tracking hiring practices in professional and college sports for a decade.
The proportion of senior administrators in the NBA who are women increased to 41 percent in 1998 from 23 percent in 1996, the center’s research shows. In the central office of Major League Baseball, 25 percent of executives and department heads were women in 1998; in 1990, 11 percent were women.
Between 1993 and 2000, the number of female vice presidents increased to 25 from four on teams in the NBA, to 10 from four in the NFL, and to nine from one in Major League Baseball, according to the Center for the Study of Sport in Society.
Despite the opening of many doors, women are still far from achieving parity with men. Many women contend that there is still a glass ceiling within the executive ranks of professional teams, with few women given control over player evaluation, the draft, trades, salaries and other critical areas.
There is evidence, too, that white women are benefiting from new opportunities more than are women who are African-American, Latino or from other minority groups.
“The progress for women in professional sports and professional collegiate sports has been relatively good, but it definitely is outstripping the progress for minorities,” said Kevin J. Matthews, co-author of an annual “gender and racial report card” produced by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society. “It’s white women who are getting these positions.”
Salaries are not always comparable either. Veteran players in the WNBA are paid about $35,000 for the three-month summer season–less than most men who start for NBA teams make per game.
On the collegiate level, thousands of new women’s athletic teams have been created since Congress approved Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law that prohibited sex discrimination at schools receiving federal money.
But while there are many additional women coaching these teams, the proportion of women who coach women’s collegiate teams has actually been declining.
Three decades ago, more than 90 percent of women’s teams were coached by women, according to a study by two Brooklyn College professors, R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter. By 1999, only 46 percent of women’s teams were coached by women.
“Women are not on equal footing,” said Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. “I’m not saying that the opportunities aren’t there, but it doesn’t mean that all is well.”
For women who have experienced the changes firsthand, though, progress has been palpable. When Carol Blazejowski was an all-American guard at Montclair State in the 1970s, athletic scholarships were not even offered to female basketball players at her school. Blazejowski later worked for Adidas as one of the first women in sports marketing, and is now senior vice-president and general manager of the WNBA’s New York Liberty. While she said she did not expect to see complete parity with men in sports in her lifetime, she has seen significant improvement.
“We’ve made tremendous strides, and in the last five or six years the pace has hastened,” said Blazejowski, 44, a basketball Hall of Famer. “Our culture now is accepting women athletes as the norm.”
