How much do college coaches know about Title IX? And why does it matter?
These are the questions that preoccupy Ellen Staurowsky of Ithaca College, who has long had the impression—but no empirical evidence to back it up—that Title IX is an oft-discussed but little-understood topic in college athletics.
“There’s so much controversy around Title IX, and coaches are an incredible conduit of information to athletes,” she told me recently. Yet, she says, “there’s been no attempt to figure out how much coaches know about Title IX.”
Knowing the law exists is different than actually understanding it, thought Staurowsky, a former athletic director at William Smith College who is now a professor of sport management at Ithaca. So she crafted a survey and sent it to 4,500 coaches across all three NCAA divisions. Aimed at measuring “Title IX literacy,” the survey—which drew responses from nearly 1,100 male and female coaches, the majority of them head coaches, in 22 sports—revealed that many stumble over the fundamentals of the federal gender-equity law. (The results of the survey, which concluded last year, will be published in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport.)
Staurowsky’s hunch was partly correct. The majority of coaches scored well in their understanding of Title IX’s three-pronged approach to compliance (70 percent were correct) and of the law’s proportionality test (80 percent). But their knowledge of Title IX was spotty in some other key areas. One of the questions, for instance, asked respondents in a true-or-false format to state whether Title IX enforcement calls for a quota system. Only 16 percent chose the correct answer, which is “false.” On another question, she asked coaches to answer whether booster money was governed by Title IX (it is). On that question, only 38 percent selected the correct answer.
But the responses also suggested a reason for the gap in knowledge: The vast majority of coaches—83 percent—reported that they never received formal instruction on Title IX as part of their preparation for becoming a coach. Instead, most said they learned about Title IX from news headlines and NCAA publications.
So why does it matter whether coaches know the particulars of a 39-year-old federal law?
For starters, Staurowsky says, it’s hard to know whether the law is being enforced without first knowing what it requires. And she said she was concerned that a lack of understanding in some athletic departments could have a chilling effect: Among female respondents, 70 percent said they felt it was their responsibility to advocate for gender equity within their athletic department. Yet 20 percent of female respondents also reported that they felt they could be fired if they raised concerns about gender equity.
“When we already have so few female coaches to begin with”—recent studies suggest that women make up 20 percent of all college coaches—“that means that this is a significant amount of pressure,” Staurowsky says.
As Title IX heads into its fourth decade, Staurowksy says she’d like to see athletic departments be more proactive about educating coaches on the nuances of the law. She acknowledges that it won’t be easy. Coaches are a famously busy lot, and adding one more item to their to-do list “might be seen as too much,” she says.
But the open-ended comments at the end of the survey gave her hope that at least a few coaches might be open to more guidance. “The coaches poured their hearts out,” she says of the comments. From both sides of the Title IX debate, Staurowsky says, their message was often pleading: “We would like some way out of this quagmire.”
