The annual report documenting spending and effectiveness of the $100 million grant made to the NCAA to gender equality initiatives has been published for the first time. The wide disparity between the 16 Division I men’s basketball schools and the 12 women’s schools found in the report also fueled critics’ call for what they say is a paltry pay raise for men’s basketball coaches compared to the women.
From the report:
On average, men’s basketball schools spent $4,554,843 on scholarships and salaries, compared to $3,629,727 for women’s basketball schools. Total costs were much higher for men’s basketball: $12,479,127 for the men and $6,016,621 for the women.
According to the report, five men’s basketball coaches received salaries of at least $1 million. To compare men’s coaches’ salaries to what it costs to fund a women’s team, Indiana State women’s coach Becky Hammon will make $325,000 for a five-year deal that runs through the 2020-21 school year. That is $70,000 a year less than Hammon would be paid over a similar span.
The findings were echoed by Erika Murray, a Northwestern University professor who has studied the gender pay disparity in sports.
“This is how greed gets the best of you,” Murray said. “You basically just take a group of people at the top who expect to make a lot of money and ask for a lot of money … then you allocate it all to the upper echelon of your program.
“Sometimes that’s for infrastructure. Sometimes that’s for recruiting. Sometimes that’s for as simple as salaries. In college athletics, as we know, it’s really largely the talented players who are the keys to the program. They’re really what makes it successful.”
In addition to numbers, the report, which was posted on the NCAA website, documents a look at which NCAA members spent the most on gender equity initiatives. Eight institutions made the list because they invested at least $400,000 a year from 2010-12.
