Muffet McGraw and the Coaching Wage Gap

A look at how Rutgers is emblematic of the gender inequality in college athletics

At the Women’s Final Four last month, Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw made an impassioned argument for gender equity in college basketball coaching.

“We don’t have enough female role models,” she said. “We don’t have enough visible women leaders. We don’t have enough women in power.” The Fighting Irish coach said that she has intentionally hired all-female staffs in recent years, pointing to the near total homogeneity of male coaches in men’s basketball as her motivation.

“Why shouldn’t 100 or 99 percent of the jobs in women’s basketball go to women?” she continued. “Maybe it’s because we only have 10 percent women athletic directors in Division I. People hire people who look like them. And that’s the problem.”

McGraw is right that the problem stems from the question of who is in power in athletic departments. But it extends beyond male domination of coaching positions.

At Rutgers, New Jersey’s biggest public university, this issue is reflected in coaching salaries. The disparity isn’t that female coaches make less than male coaches, but rather that coaches of women’s teams make less than those of men’s teams.

The university spent just over $10 million on coach salaries this year, but 68 percent of that went to coaches of men’s teams. Even after removing football from the equation, Rutgers spent an average of over $350,000 on coach salaries for each men’s team, compared to just under $250,000 for each women’s team. These figures were obtained through an Open Public Records Act request.

The inequality is starkest in basketball. Rutgers’ men’s team is given $1,425,000 to spend on coaches, while its women’s team only has $1,054,300. Each team has four coaches. Sports are commonly talked about as the ultimate meritocracy, but that simply isn’t the case here.

Rutgers women’s basketball has appeared in 25 NCAA Tournaments in 45 seasons, has an all-time winning percentage of 70 percent, and played in the national championship game in 2007. The men’s team, however, has appeared in only six NCAA Tournaments in 105 seasons and has an all-time winning percentage of just 51 percent.

It’s worth noting that the head coach of the women’s basketball team, C. Vivian Stringer, has a salary of $600,000, which is $50,000 more than the men’s head coach, Steve Pikiell. But Stringer has been at the school since 1995. She was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009 and earned her 1,000th career win earlier this season. Pikiell, on the other hand, just completed his third season with the university, his first head coaching position in a Power Five conference.

Other notable coaching salary gender gaps at Rutgers include men’s lacrosse ($336,650) vs. women’s lacrosse ($236,000), and baseball ($312,400) vs. softball ($200,000). All four teams employ three coaches each.

The classic argument against equal pay for coaches is that teams like football and men’s basketball can afford to pay higher salaries because of their lucrative television deals and ticket revenue. But the same cannot be said of the lacrosse teams, or of the baseball and softball teams. All four had operating budgets of approximately $1.1 million in the 2016 fiscal year.

As McGraw contended, the root cause of this inequality lies with who is empowered to dole out these salaries. Rutgers’ current athletic director is a man named Pat Hobbs. He took over the role in 2015 following the abrupt dismissal of Julie Hermann, who held the position for less than three years. Hermann remains the only female athletic director in the university’s history.

None of this surprised Nicole LaVoi, Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. “This trend is consistent at almost every institution in the Power Five conferences,” she said. Her organization’s research has found that some assistant coaches of men’s teams are paid what head coaches of women’s teams are.

“Men and women should be paid equally for doing the same jobs,” she said. “A head coach of a women’s team and a head coach of a men’s team do the same work, the same job.” Like McGraw, LaVoi sees the problem as structural. “Coaches of women’s teams are given less resources across the board by their schools, from facilities, budgets, and salaries to media, marketing, and support.”

Both women believe that finally ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment would go a long way towards rectifying this problem. That amendment, originally introduced in Congress for the first time in 1921, would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex.

But until then, LaVoi appreciates women in positions of power, like the Notre Dame coach, using their platforms to help raise awareness. “I listened to her speech maybe 50 times,” LaVoi said. “I’m so grateful that she’s using her voice to make a difference.”