It’s about more than just the money
“I just think if you’re only hiring white males — and I’m saying that as a white male — you’re probably leaving a lot on the table in terms of where your organization can go, and how it can think, and how it can evolve and develop.”
Vickie Croley’s daughter, Caitlin, was 10 years old when a comment about her mother’s schedule stopped the University of Western Ontario’s track and field coach in her, well, tracks.
“She said, ‘Mommy, you’ve missed everybody’s birthday this year, including yours, because of track,’” Croley recalled.
Croley, after 25 years at Western, knows raising a family and balancing a full-time coaching position is a tall task. Sometimes that thought gets pushed aside, as she juggles her own busy schedule. Other times, like backstage in the combined events room at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, it’s too obvious to go unnoticed. There as Canadian decathlete Damian Warner’s personal instructor, Croley was the lone female coach in the room.
“That kind of stood out as, ‘Oh my gosh, there should be more. We need to fix this still,’” Croley said. “I used to think, ‘I want to get female coaches to get involved in coaching and kind of let their passion keep them there.’ But there’s also reality: it needs to be a paid position. Passion can’t just completely dictate all your hours.”
The fight for equal pay and conditions extends to many areas of sports.
A global study investigating prize money by BBC Sport in 2017 contacted 68 governing bodies. Of the 55 who responded, 44 paid prize money, with 35 paying equal amounts to men and women. Surfing joined that movement last year when the World Surf League announced equal prize money at every event in 2019 and beyond. But there is disparity, too. France, the winner of the men’s World Cup of soccer last summer, earned $38 million US from FIFA, soccer’s governing body. The winner of the Women’s World Cup this summer will rake in just $4 million for its federation. And prize money is far from the full story.
In the U.S., the women’s national team’s players’ association publicly waged a battle for pay equality in 2016, buoyed when five prominent players filed a compliant with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, arguing their team was paid almost four times less than their male counterparts despite being the more accomplished and popular of the two squads. The team had previously complained about poor field conditions and refereeing in comparison to the men’s game.
The labour impasse — which was settled in 2017 with a new collective bargaining agreement that included, according to Sports Illustrated, a significant increase in direct and bonus compensation, better travel and hotel benefits, per diems equal to the men’s team and greater financial support for players who are pregnant or adopting children — prompted action from women’s national soccer teams in Canada, Spain, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia, Ireland and Norway. WNBA players like Kayla McBride and A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces and Canadians Kia Nurse of the New York Liberty and Natalie Achonwa of the Indiana Fever have also spoken up about their worth, with NBA support from the likes of Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry and Denver Nuggets guard Isaiah Thomas.
“It’s not just that we want more money, it’s not that we want to compare ourselves to NBA players and what they make, we understand,” Achonwa told The Canadian Press last August. “We’re the most educated professional sports league —most of the WNBA players are college graduates — we understand that it’s not that we just feel like they should give us more money. NBA [players] get 50 per cent of their revenue, we make less than 25 per cent of it [22 per cent]. We want a bigger piece of the pie.”
Salaries, sponsorship opportunities and media coverage are also a concern. Women in Sports, a charity in the United Kingdom, estimates that between 2011 and 2013, women’s sports sponsorships accounted for just 0.4 per cent of all sports sponsorships internationally. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization reported last February that only four per cent of sports media content is dedicated to women’s sports, and only 12 per cent of sports news is presented by women.
The barriers can be even more difficult to overcome for women who identify as visible minorities. According to the NCAA’s Demographics Database for 2018, 44 per cent of student athletes across their three competitive divisions were female: five per cent of those athletes identified as Black, and nine per cent identified as “other.” Women held 21 per cent of the NCAA’s head coaching positions, with 2.1 per cent identifying as Black and 1.5 per cent in the “other” category.
Coaching-wise, Croley wants to see more female athletes encouraged to transition into the role. She suggested more grants for women looking to get into coaching or for organizations looking to hire female coaches as ways to help improve the pipeline.
“The people that are doing the hiring need to make it easier in some ways to give some experience to women in these roles,” she said. “I’d like to encourage the current athlete to consider coaching as a profession and know that we can raise a family and still coach and there’s ways in which it’s made easier to do that.”
Teresa Resch also had one of those moments where she realized she was the only woman in her role in the room.
It was at the 2014 NBA draft combine as a member of the Raptors’ executive team sent to evaluate talent and make decisions about which players the club might target when their turn came up at the draft.
Four years later, Resch, now the club’s vice-president of basketball operations and player development, found herself back at the combine but this time was chatting with a female executive from the WNBA, a female executive from the Orlando Magic and a female scout with the Philadelphia 76ers. She was no longer alone. The NBA has long been considered the gold standard for equality in men’s sport. According to the 2018 Lapchick Racial and Gender Report Card on the league, women held 23.5 per cent of vice-president positions, 37.2 per cent of team staff positions and 31.6 per cent of team staff positions in the NBA. The seven women who served as team presidents/CEOs during the 2017-18 season ranked as the highest number in men’s professional sports. The NBA’s overall grade of ‘B’ for gender hiring was better than the National Football League and Major League Baseball, both of which earned a ‘C’, and Major League Soccer, which earned a ‘C+’. The NHL was not graded.
“People see it as an obligation, you know, like, ‘Oh, I have to hire women,’” Raptors president Masai Ujiri said in a recent documentary on women in the league, as part of NBA Digital’s Players Only Films series. “It’s not that to me. It’s an opportunity to bring people together. That’s what diversity is.”
Resch agrees that the NBA is one of the organizations at the forefront of the fight for diversity, and it shows with the hirings of Becky Hammon as an assistant coach with the Spurs and Kelly Krauskopf as assistant GM for the Pacers.
The Raptors, a franchise renowned around the league for its female contingent, also won the NBA Inclusion Innovation Award last year for its emPower Her program, a mentoring effort between female executives at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and about 40 girls aged from 12 to 14. But, like everywhere else, there is still a ways to go, Resch said.
Women in sports don’t want special treatment. They want to be treated equally and held to the same standards as men, and want to reap the same rewards for the work that they do.
Resch ultimately wants to see women in top positions, with parity at every level and in every area to grow the pipeline of talent. That would ensure qualified women could be considered for any type of role.
“I think some people are just like, ‘Oh, well, we have a woman working here,’ or, ‘We have three women working here, that’s good enough,’” she said. “It’s like, no … an industry that’s been a boys’ club for 100 years doesn’t change overnight so there’s always going to be hurdles. Recognizing those and being mindful of those is important.”