The women’s half of college basketball’s March Madness has just ended in Dallas with a first-ever national title for the University of South Carolina. But on the eve of the women’s Final Four, the world of women’s basketball got caught up in a different kind of madness: the latest feeding frenzy of the outrage culture. The victim this time was a man who, even his detractors admit, has dedicated his career to championing women—but who permitted himself to speak heresy about gender issues.
The thought criminal is renowned basketball coach Geno Auriemma, who has led the University of Connecticut’s Lady Huskies since 1985, turning them into the nation’s top women’s college basketball team. (This year, the Huskies were defeated in the round of four.) Auriemma is widely credited—along with the late Pat Summit, the formidable female coach of the Huskies’ rivals, the Tennessee Lady Vols—for the massive boost in the popularity of women’s hoops in the 1990s that enabled the game to go pro.
At a press conference last Thursday, Auriemma permitted himself a heretical observation on the relatively low percentage of women among head coaches of NCAA women’s athletic programs. It currently stands at about 40 percent, down from about 90 percent in 1972 when Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in college athletics, was enacted. (Of course, the number of women’s programs was far smaller at the time.) In basketball, the figures are better: 58 percent of Division I teams are coached by women. But that’s down from 63 percent 10 years ago.
Auriemma’s problematic explanation: “Not as many women want to coach. It’s quite simple.” He pointed out that women today have many more opportunities in other fields where they won’t have to spend a lot of time sitting in a gym and trying to recruit “17-year-old spoiled brats” and where they can have more of a “normal life.”
Feminists—ironically led by Auriemma’s daughter Ally, a UConn adjunct professor and freelance writer—had a predictably tolerant and mature reaction. “DAD. WALK IT BACK,” tweeted Ally Auriemma, who specializes in gender/sexuality studies and feminist literature and describes herself as an “intersectional feminist” with a passion for “smashing patriarchy in the face.” While the younger Auriemma took issue with suggestions that her dad was anti-woman, she noted:
That being said he is speaking from an obvious limited perspective as a white cisgendered man so I am head-desking hard.
After feminist writer and musician Deborah Grabien commented that white men are “diapered in privilege,” Ally Auriemma added this bit of scintillating wit:
A l l y @allyauriemma 8h8 hours ago
A l l y Retweeted Deborah Grabien
“Time to change your Privilege diaper, you made a verbal poo”
Meanwhile, Washington Post sports writer Sally Jenkins chimed in with this:
Sally Jenkins Verified account @sallyjenx 8h8 hours ago
Sometimes Geno Auriemma says things that make you want to hit him over the head with a purse.
Apparently, jokingly advocating violence in response to speech is all right if the target is a white male. Of course: It’s “punching up,” or purse-swinging up in this case.
In her Washington Post column on the controversy, Jenkins laments that, like many other well-intentioned men, Geno Auriemma is “blindered” by the belief that women’s lack of progress is due to of their own choices. To Jenkins, the “simple” answer is that “88 percent of NCAA Division I athletic directors, the people doing the hiring, are white men”—and while other factors such as work-family conflicts may be implicated, unconscious sexist biases are the main thing holding women back. For instance, she claims, female coaches are given less latitude to bounce back from career setbacks, while male coaches who get fired tend to be promptly “recycled” into other programs.
But the example Jenkins and others cite as evidence of this disparity may actually support Geno Auriemma’s point. According to Jenkins, Melanie Balcomb, fired from the women’s basketball program at Vanderbilt last year after 14 successful years as a head coach, “was unemployed for three months, until Dawn Staley at South Carolina rescued her by creating a job for her as an ‘analytics consultant.’” Yet it turns out that the reason Balcomb did not continue as a coach was, actually, that she didn’t want to coach at that point in her life. Jenkins admits that Balcomb “has two children under the age of 6, which made her hesitate to apply for another head-coaching job because of the moving and travel demands.” (Also, Balcomb’s prospects before her “rescue” by Staley may not have been as dreary as Jenkins implies: An Associated Press report on her move to South Carolina says she got offers to join programs as a consultant “almost as soon as she lost her job.”)
Incidentally, Staley, the Olympic gold medalist and current head coach of South Carolina’s winning team, has also made some potentially problematic comments about the numbers for women in coaching—for instance, that it’s a “great thing” that women’s basketball has achieved enough popularity and excellence to attract more male coaches. While she stressed the need to do more to help talented women stay in coaching programs, Staley also said, “I’m one that thinks basketball is a place of utopia and fairness.” Imagine what a “privileged” comment that would be if a white man rather than a black woman had made it.
Another top female coach in women’s collegiate basketball, Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw, has also made observations which aren’t that different from Geno Auriemma’s alleged faux pas. On the same day that the UConn coach incurred the wrath of the sisterhood, a New York Times article on women in coaching quoted McGraw as saying, “The work-life balance, I think, is a bigger issue for women than it is for men.” McGraw also told the Times that when she last had an opening for assistant coach, some 70 percent of those applying for the position were male.
Can athletics programs do more to make jobs more family-friendly? Probably—but it’s very likely that such efforts can only go so far, given the inherent demands of a coach’s job. More male participation in child care would reduce the pressure on women, but it would not necessarily change women’s preferences for family time: for instance, Balcomb’s spouse and co-parent is another woman.
To anyone not “blindered” by ideology, it’s pretty obvious that Geno Auriemma was referring to a real pattern. One may argue about why this pattern exists, whether it’s due to nature or culture, and whether our institutions should do more to support work-family balance and maximize women’s career opportunities. One can debate whether Auriemma’s “simple explanation” was too simplistic. But Auriemma’s critics are not interested in argument or debate; they’re interested in public shaming and squelching wrongthink.
It doesn’t matter that Auriemma is, by any meaningful definition of the term, a “feminist ally”: he has coached dozens of successful female athletes, promoted women’s sports, and (as Jenkins notes in passing) made a point of hiring female assistant coaches. A politically incorrect opinion is still an unforgivable transgression. The thought police won’t rest until he repents and admits that he loves Big Sister.