Study: FBS fails in gender hiring

Lapchick gives F on AD numbers

As you watch the College Football Playoff national championship game between Alabama and Ohio State, one of the most interesting parts won’t be what’s on the field but off it. Or, rather, what’s missing, and that will be women in key leadership positions.

Alabama and Ohio State are far from alone. According to a new study, the Football Bowl Subdivision has one of the sorriest records in all of sports when it comes to gender hiring practices.

The annual diversity report from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, written by Richard Lapchick, gave the FBS a B- for racial hiring practices but an F for gender hiring practices, including failing grades for university chancellors and presidents, as well as athletic directors. The result was an overall D+ grade.

“The lack of representation of women in athletic director or president or chancellor positions has remained an issue within the arena of college sport,” Lapchick writes.

He added: “Although there were three more women athletic directors (a 2.3 percentage point increase) at FBS schools, the grade in this category remained an F. Men still comprise an overwhelming majority of athletic director positions with a total of 118 of the 130 DI FBS schools.”

The report looked at the racial and gender makeup of Division I FBS leadership, in the same way it examined racial and gender hiring practices of other sports such as the NFL and NBA.

The report says the positions of leadership it examined include conference commissioners and campus leaders, as well as school presidents and chancellors, athletic directors, and faculty athletic representatives from the 130 institutions that make up the FBS. The report also addressed the racial and gender composition of head football coaches, assistant coaches and student-athletes for the football teams.

In 2020, the report states, Black men represented only 10.0% of head coaches compared to 48.5% of football players.

“The low grades recorded in 2020 reflect the lack of significant growth of diversity in FBS leadership and leads to the continued inequity in sport,” Lapchick writes. “The results again do not reflect the far more diverse composition of students and student-athletes at colleges and universities across the country. They do not even reflect the composition of the American people.”

Also, white people held 82.0% of the 399 campus leadership positions, a decrease from 84.3% in 2019, the study says.