Crisis in female coaches shortchanges women, athletes.

Sex discrimination, extreme workloads, lack of family-friendly jobs and bias against minorities and lesbians are to blame for the dearth of women in varsity coaching, according to a new report from Pennsylvania State University.

As a result, today's female athletes are half as likely to have women head coaches as before the passage of Title IX in 1972, depriving them of female role models and the inclination to pursue careers in sports management, promotion, broadcasting or related fields after ending their days as athletes.

Because there are 10 times as many female varsity athletes today as when Title IX was passed, coaching women's teams has changed from a volunteer or part-time job to one that attracts breadwinners--mostly men. But the informal ways coaches are trained, evaluated and hired means the good old boy's network of recruiting and hiring by asking "Who do you know?" continues to rob female coaches of career opportunities.

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The report stems from a study, "CAGE: The Coaching and Gender Equity Project." Principal investigators were Dr. Robert Drago, professor of labor studies and Women's Studies at Penn State and Lynn Hennighausen, work-life consultant and author of Shades of Grey, with Jacqueline Rogers, Teresa Vescio and Kai Dawn Stauffer.

Funders were the NCAA, the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators (NACWAA) and Penn State's Commission for Women and Athletics.

It began with a casual thought by Hennighausen, who had met Drago previously at a work/life conference, about how she would feel if she couldn't discuss her family at work, which is the way a woman told her she felt about working in a male-dominated campus athletics department. Hennighausen and Drago agreed to do a study that would focus on work/family issues in college athletics departments.