“There Are No Women On The Gender Equality Commission?”

NBC Sitcom Parks & Recreation, Season 5, Episode 11, Women & Garbage

For those of you who are fans of the NBC situation comedy, Parks and Recreation, you may have caught the recent episode  entitled Women and Garbage where city councilwoman, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) takes up the banner of carrying on the legacy of women serving in government by encouraging the creation of a Gender Equality Commission.  At the urging of Knope, city manager Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe) puts out a call to all departments seeking representatives to serve.  At the first meeting, Leslie looks out at the individuals assembled and asks , “Did anyone notice that there are no women on the Gender Equality Commission?”

Taking on the Department of Sanitation whose hiring record in terms of women is described by Leslie as “abysmal”, she asks why there are no female garbage collectors.  One of the members of the staff says, “There aren’t that many women who apply plus it’s a very demanding job.  The average woman can’t handle it.”  In an effort to prove them wrong, Leslie and colleague April (Aubrey Plaza) take on the challenge of handling trash removal on a scheduled run, fulfilling their plan of not just completing the run but doing it better than the men who have been doing the job.  Just as they are on the cusp of succeeding, they receive another assignment, this time a huge refrigeration unit that appears to be unmovable.  Faced with an insurmountable obstacle, they learn by happenstance that the men in the department couldn’t move it either.  Using ingenuity and outside of the box thinking, they eventually prevail in doing something that the men had been unable to do.

While some have characterized the episode as far-fetched and ridiculous, the script writers could have easily recreated this scene in an athletic department and heard the same kinds of explanations, even in 2013.  According to a report published by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport in November of 2012, of the 120 athletic directors who oversee programs in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) only four or 3.3 percent are women.  Commissioners in the eleven FBS conferences are all male.  The longitudinal study of the status of women in intercollegiate coaching and administration conducted by Vivian Acosta and Linda Carpenter reveal low numbers for women in coaching, with roughly 44% of head coaches of women’s team are women.   Among all head coaches of both men’s and women’s teams, women make up approximately 20 percent.

In an NCAA study that examines the representation of women and/or racial minorities within college and university athletic departments,  women dominate in only two and comprise more than a majority in three (academic counselor – 59.8%; business manager – 59.9%; compliance director – 52.9%) out of 22 identified positions .*  Notably, the position where women are represented in the highest number and percent is administrative assistant.   The second category where women serve in substantially higher numbers than men is in the category of “life skills coordinator”.    When considered together, these data reveal a workplace that is sex-segregated for women coaches and sex-stereotyped in terms of women’s roles within an athletic department.  Women congregate in positions of support and in areas where the educational interests of athletes are served.  They are less likely to be in positions of power that affect policy, program direction, and revenue production.

In considering the antics of Leslie and April, the metaphor of women and garbage is an apt one.  As they toured around town on the back of trash hauler, they were symbolically throwing out one set of assumptions about women after the other, relegating them to the trash heap where they belonged.  They were also reminding us that there is still quite a bit of garbage that women still have to put up with and leave out at the curb.

*Senior woman administrator is listed as a position with women represented in this group at 99.6 percent.  Women typically are not hired specifically into a senior woman administrator role.  The term comes from an NCAA mandate that athletic departments must designate at least one woman as “the highest ranking female involved with the management of an institution‘s intercollegiate athletic program” (NCAA Division I Manual, 2011, p. 30).