Tennessee Rejects Equal Pay for Women's Athletics Officials

The Washington Post reports that the University of Tennessee recently rejected an internal complaint filed by three employees of women's athletics, arguing that their salaries were discriminatory because they were less than their counterparts in men's athletics. The employees held the positions of Athletics Director for Women’s Sports Medicine, Assistant Athletics Director for Women’s Strength and Conditioning, and the Associate Director for Women’s Strength and Conditioning, until the recent merger of men's and women's athletics at Tennessee.

The University of Tennessee's Office of Equity and Diversity denied their pay discrimination claims after determining that these positions in women's athletics were not comparable to the equivalent positions in men's athletics to justify equal pay. Specifically, the Office stated that due to the financial importance of football to the university, the sports medicine/strength & conditioning employees in men's athletics had a more important job because it mattered more financially that male athletes were healthy:

Football overwhelmingly is the top revenue-generating sport in Athletics and the sport that generates the most fan interest,” the report says. “If the University’s football team is successful, then the entire Athletics program reaps the monetary benefits. If the University’s football team is unsuccessful even partly because football injuries are not being prevented, diagnosed, treated and rehabilitated successfully, then the entire Athletics program suffers. “With no disrespect being intended to Ms. Moshak [Athletic Director for Women's Sports Medicine], Mr. McVeigh’s position [Director of Men's Sports Medicine] is more important to athletics because of his football-related responsibilities."

With this statement, the University of Tennessee declares its true intentions in running an athletic department -- not, as its mission statement conveys, to enrich the education of student athletes, but to exploit the revenue-generating potential of certain sports. Aside from being hypocritical and morally void, this position also suggests that the University is (or was in the recent past prior to the merger) violating Title IX with respect to its athletes, as the law requires equal treatment when it comes to "medical and training facilities and services." And the law contains no exception for football or any sport because of its capacity to generate revenue.

Nor is it clear whether football's revenue justifies paying men's medical and training staff more. If this case made its way to the EEOC, the federal agency that enforces Title VII and the Equal Pay Act, it would consider whether the medical and training staff that McVeigh oversees is comparable in size to Moshak's. Yes, it may take more work to keep the football team healthy, but if you get a larger staff as a result, you can't use "football takes more work" as a justification for unequal pay. Another factor that the EEOC would consider is whether men's and women's athletics received equal opportunity to generate revenue. If the university allocated fewer resources to market and promote women's teams, it can't use the fact that men's teams bring in more revenue to justify pay disparities between men's and women's athletics.

The article does not suggest what's next for this case. Now that the university's decision is final, having been approved by the President on internal appeal, it will be interesting to see if the employees press their claims with the EEOC. And though its less likely, it would be even more interesting to see if someone presses the disparity in medical training as a violation of Title IX.

The day after

Sports writer Sally Jenkins has a few things to say to Barack Obama, including reforming the BCS, as we mentioned yesterday--something she believes he can easily accomplish.
No specific mention of Title IX, but number 8 on her list of requests is equal pay in women's sports. She takes the case of Tennessee basketball as a prime example of inequality in sports:
Volunteers men's basketball coach Bruce Pearl is in only his fourth season at Tennessee and never has been past the Sweet 16, yet he makes more than twice what Summitt makes -- an average of $2.3 million a year, plus a retention bonus of $1.5 million. Summitt is in her 35th season at Tennessee and has won eight national championships, graduated 100 percent of her players who have completed their eligibility and is closing in on 1,000 career victories.

She also asks him to show America that basketball is basketball--not men's basketball and women's basketball. She suggests a good way to illustrate this is to invite Candace Parker to the White House for some one-on-one. Better do it sooner in the first 100 days rather than later. It's going to be harder for her to get her dunk on when she's dunking for two!

I stand corrected

Welch Suggs was nice enough to gently correct me regarding my concerns over the portrayal of the financial doings of the University of Tennessee athletic department. Or should I say athletic departments--plural. I was surprised--clearly--to learn that UT still keeps separate men's and women's athletic departments. (Suggs mentions it briefly on page 98 of A Place on the Team.)Thus it is theoretically possible that their student activity fee goes to the women's athletic department. But whether it is the whole thing or part or even if part goes to the men's department is unknown.
Of course, just because there are two athletic departments does not make the accounting practices any clearer. It could even make things more complicated.
If I, or my cohorts, find out more, I will update.

The (mis)management of information

Sometimes I am casually reading an article and have to just stop in disbelief. No, they can't possibly be saying what I think they are saying.

Here is such a paragraph in an article about athletics at the University of Tennessee:
University of Tennessee is different than most, however. It is one of a handful of public university athletics departments that do not receive state dollars or money from the university's academic side. In short, whatever money UT athletics brings in, that's what it can spend. The only exception is $1 million in student fees that are used to support women's sports.

So many things going on here, it's hard to figure out where to begin.

The first thing to note is that it is very difficult to prove definitively what is true or false or a just a little bit off in the above statement. This is because, as we--and so many others--have mentioned before, accounting practices in athletic departments are not uniform across institutions and generally are quite confusing if not outright misleading.

Second, there are some things we can probably figure out by what little information we have. The above paragraph makes it seem like men's sports are self-supporting and women's sports rely on student fees to exist. This is not the case. There are not two separate athletic departments. They all take from the same pool. Football at UT does appear to make money (this does not take into consideration costs associated with facilities (energy, upkeep, staffing, etc.) but that does not mean that these revenues support say men's tennis over women's track. Whether it's really true that UT athletics takes no money from the state or the "academic side" of things could be true. (According to the numbers at the Department of Education website they operate about 3 million in the black.) But there is a large chunk of non-gender and non-sport specific revenues (of which I would assume the student fee is a part) that it would be difficult to find a complete explanation for. Fees, boosters, donors, etc. is my guess. But again it is revenue not specifically generated by one sport or gender and is not applied to one gender or sport.

And lastly, the paragraph reads like a fact--unequivocal. Did this information come from the university and/or the athletic department? Did the writer/editors, using information provided by the university, just presume that student fees only support women's sports? Which way the misinformation flowed may be difficult to discern. And it is likely that it is flowing in all sorts of directions. Because the problems exist at multiple levels. Stats and data are presented as neutral. They are read and interpreted by people who believe they too are neutral/unbiased. And then we get incidences like the above and, of course, all the other information presented as fact to people who really want to believe a particular version of how intercollegiate athletics operate.