By Laura Pappano

Lately, major marathons have become a showcase for record-breaking male performances and today’s New York City Marathon was no exception: Kenyan Geoffrey Mutai finished in 2:05:05, setting a new course record (all three top male finishers broke the record).

So much men’s record-breaking has been going on, in fact, that American marathoner Meb Keflezighi predicted that a two-hour marathon was not only possible, but “hopefully we can see it soon.”

This is not happening on the women’s side. But something else IS happening: We have more top women runners, more contenders, more speedy women clustered at the top of marathon finishes. Consider New York.

While Ethiopian Firehiwot Dado won New York with a 2:23:15, New Yorker Buzenesh Deba was just four seconds behind — and the top 10 female finishers were within 5:48 of Dado. Last year, the top 10 women were within 1:35 of one another.

Obviously, each year’s particular field changes, but if we go back a decade – to 2001 – top finisher Margaret Okayo’s time of 2:24:21 was 7:22 ahead of #10.

In 1991, the difference between Liz McColgan’s 2:26:32 and #10 was 14:34.

In 1981, Allison Roe’s winning time, 2:25:29 was 17:21 ahead of 10^th place.

In 1971, we didn’t even have 10 top women, but let’s just say that the gap between #1 Beth Bonner at 2:55:22 and #4 was, well, nearly two hours.

This, believe it or not, is progress. In the decade marks between 1981 and 2011, the top female finisher’s time improved by just 2:14, but the spread between #1 and #10 over that time improved by a stunning 11:33.

Yes, we need to be faster, to break records – and we can. But to have so many top women in contention is surely a start.

Yes, we’ve heard the exciting Chicago Marathon results. Despite the heat (78 degrees according to my iPhone) Moses Mosop set a course record (2:05:37) and Liliya Shobukhova finished in 2:18:20, making it her third straight Chicago win, and her the second-fastest woman behind Paula Radcliffe who holds the women’s marathon record with a 2:15:25.

The elites commanded the headlines, but if you were in Chicago this past weekend – as I was to cheer on my 19-year-old daughter as she ran – you bore witness to the collision of two major cultural events: The Marathon and the Mourning of Steve Jobs.

It was impossible to miss pilgrimage to the Apple Store on North Michigan Ave. with it’s growing shrine of colored, handwritten post-its, flowers, candles (and, of course, apples) – juxtaposed against the running-shoe clad marathon throngs (45,000 runners!) prepping for their personal journeys.

The connection was in plain sight: Jobs has changed how we marathon.

From the iTunes playlists downloaded onto shuffles to the ability to track your runner or navigate a new city, Apple has altered the race. I saw it over and over yesterday as I joined the shadow marathoners – loved ones with neon posters, pomp-pons, clown wigs, (anything to catch an exhausted runners’ attention!) trying to spot runners at various points along the route.

Because Chicago has a looping course (unlike, say, Boston), it’s possible to pop on and off subways to cheer for your runner in multiple spots where CTA stops coincide with the marathon route. But the sheer volume of runners means that to know when your runner will be at any given spot, you rely on text messages to your smartphone.

Chicago Marathon route map with subway stops

Throughout the race, my iPhone pinged me at various markers along the course with an update on my daughter’s progress, pace, and expected finish time. And I wasn’t the only one glued to these messages; the audible pings of people’s iPhone updates became as much a fixture of the day as the guys in yellow shirts handing out water and Gatorade.

It was common to hear a “ping” and then see people sprint for the subway station with rolled up signs tucked under an arm. I found myself, in between the pings, using the calculator to re-figure when she’d arrive where I planned to be. Then, of course, I used the map feature as I walked from Mile 20 to the finish (taking a shorter route than the runners).

And as my daughter finished, I received her unofficial time, pace, and the real time so I could guess when to meet her at the family reunification area. By the time we met, she’d taken out her ear buds and turned off her iPod shuffle. After her roommate called (she’d been getting the pings, too), I took a photo of her that she immediately posted to Facebook (using her iPhone app) — setting off a popcorn of pinging congrats.

Apple Store shrine the morning of the Chicago Marathon

Last July when Federal District Court Judge Stefan Underhill found Quinnipiac University violated Title IX, in part, because it counted cheerleading as a varsity sport, most of the debate was about – you guessed it: Is cheerleading a sport?

The decision, however, also discussed the school’s “roster management” practices that made it appear that there were more female athletes than there actually were.

At the time, ESPN writer Gregg Easterbrook complained that “the decision includes a good 20 pages of hair-splitting arguments regarding how many members the school’s various teams have…” – what he found to be “ultratrivia” that made the complaint a “junk-science lawsuit.”

What Easterbrook (and others) feel is focus on minutiae, however, turns out to be a pattern of dissembling that colleges use to skirt Title IX rules. NY Times reporter Katie Thomas has done compelling reporting to reveal a practice that is nothing short of – well – widespread cheating.

What women’s college cross-country team has 75 runners on its roster? Answer: The University of South Florida. (The men’s team has nine).

Thomas interviews women who don’t even know that they are included on the rosters of women’s sports teams – as well as those who know they are included but are not required to attend practice if they don’t want to. Not attending practice is unthinkable – even for children playing recreational sports.

All this reminds us that those who sound the drumbeat of Title IX hurting men’s sports are missing the point: Despite the law, despite “progress,” many institutions are still just pretending to play fair when it comes to gender equity in sports.

We’ve known for years that Title IX is not well-enforced. But the level of dissembling that Thomas’ investigation reveals is downright embarrassing to the Office for Civil Rights and to the colleges and universities who take public dollars and tuition money — and, by the way, not just from their male students.

Campus protest, anyone?

Whether or not the IAAF decides to recognize as a new world record Geoffrey Mutai’s win in the Boston Marathon, crossing in 2:03:02 – 57 seconds faster than Haile Gebreselassie’s 2008 record of 2:03:59 – is, in some ways, immaterial.

He was fast. He was so thrillingly fast (and on a course that – let’s be honest, rarely sees records) that people are resurrecting that tantalizing debate: Will someone break a two-hour marathon? Could that happen?

Sadly, the discussion about speed and possibility is only on the men’s side.  On the women’s side, we wonder: Will anyone ever again run as fast as Paula Radcliffe did eight years ago?

Consider that in April 2003, when Radcliffe ran the London Marathon in a new world record time for women of 2:15:25, the men’s record was held by Khalid Kannouchi with a time of 2:05:38, set the previous year in London.

But here’s the stunner: His time has been bested 29 times since then (counting Mutai’s race in Boston last week).

Not only has Radcliffe’s best time not been beaten, it hasn’t even been challenged (the next fastest time is also hers, and it’s nearly two minutes slower). The next five fastest women’s marathon times were recorded in 2005 – and earlier.

The most recent “fast” times for women were this year in London — Mary Keitany finished in 2:19:19 and Liliya Shobukhova came in second in 2:20:15. But these are several minutes from the record.

The nagging question: Why have women’s marathon times plateaued?

While Radcliffe’s 2003 record put her on par with men’s records of the 1960s, women’s “fast” times now – 2:19 — are what record-holding men ran in the 1950s.

Debate about female limitations and what women are “capable of” is not new. In 2001, conventional wisdom held that women weren’t physiologically able to run a sub-2:20 marathon. Then in a spurt of speed, that record fell, again and again.

So what’s next? More women are running marathons. We have better training, nutrition, coaching, support, prize money.

In the week that we lost the great Grete Waitz, it’s time to reflect: How do we find the next gear?

Please send your nominations to laura@laurapappano.com — or make your suggestion as a comment on the blog. Our team will review all ideas (plus our own) and we will post a final list on December 28.

R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter, professors emerita at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College and co-authors of a book on Title IX, have collected data on women’s roles on – and off – the field in college athletics since 1977.  They have chaired departments, taught pre-med courses, coached men’s and women’s college teams, and been a force in the governance of athletics for decades. Acosta played varsity basketball, field hockey, volleyball, tennis, softball and badminton for Brigham Young University during her college days; Carpenter was on BYU’s basketball, volleyball, softball, swimming, and gymnastics teams (“The seasons were short” back then, notes Acosta)

Today, Carpenter enjoys waterskiing, golf, and badminton. The day before her 70th birthday in July, Acosta won gold and silver medals in badminton at the Connecticut Senior Games. She also enjoys golf. We spoke with Acosta and Carpenter at their lakeside home last month.

FGN: Your data shows that just 42.8 percent of women’s college teams have female coaches, down from over 90 percent when Title IX was passed in 1972. Why does this matter?

LJC: It is important for female coaches to be around because [playing college sports] is a very intense part of your life and to ave female role models in an intense part of your life is particularly valuable. Guys have role models everywhere – politics, business – they are tripping over male role models.

FGN: But you hear some women saying they prefer male coaches…

RVA: Today if you ask women if they would prefer to have a male or female coach, most would say “male” because that is what they know. I would like to see more females coaching both males and females [only 2 percent of men’s team have female head coaches]. They need to see women as capable leaders, as capable of making decisions.

LJC: The studies [suggesting women prefer male coaches] are flawed. Your feelings for your coach are often related to whether it was a good season for you, if you liked the people you were with. I wouldn’t want to play for Pat Summitt because I am someone who needs to be nurtured. But the door shouldn’t be closed in one direction; it should swing both ways.

FGN: Despite whistleblower laws and other protections, it remains rare for women at colleges and universities to raise concerns of inequities in athletics – and for them to be in danger of losing their job if they do.

RVA: If their goal is to keep their position and they have no allies on campus, they [female coaches] have only one choice: that is to be quiet. If they are not quiet, they are pegged as “troublemakers.”

LJC: And there is no trouble getting rid of them — you just don’t renew their contracts. We get so many calls from coaches and administrators when things are not going well. I ask, “Who across campus can you go to for informal information?” and they don’t even know a name. You need to be respected across campus and that only happens when you spend time on committees. I find myself when I am speaking with coaches telling them that a multi-year contract is more valuable than a raise.

FGN: Is coaching harder today?

RVA: The pressure on coaches for performance is huge. It is a 24/7 job. They don’t have lives. When I see my athletic friends coaching I ask, ‘How did it get to this point? When did athletics become so darned important on campus?”

FGN: But don’t you think sports are important?

LJC: It depends on what your goals are. Where athletics wags the tail of the institution, athletics needs to be downsized. Athletic directors should not make multiples of what presidents make.

RVA: Or coaches.

LJC: If you believe the data – and its hard not to believe the data – what is this about a money-making business? I don’t think athletic directors deserve to be on campus because they are making money. The question is: How do they contribute to the life of the campus? It is not about making money; [athletic departments] launder money!

FGN: So what does this mean in terms of institutional support for men’s and women’s sports teams?

LJC: There is no reason why, for example, the women’s basketball games should always be the warm up games for the men – or that the banquet at the end of the year be humongous for the guys and lunch at McDonald’s for the gals. If you are always the “Lady Knights” [while the men are “the Knights”] it will always be subtly less valued. If you are having an institution support a program – if the band goes to the men’s game and the head athletic trainer goes to the men’s game, the head athletic trainer needs to go to the same number of women’s games and the same with the band. And that is so easy to accomplish.

FGN: You have watched the development of women’s sports for 32 years. What has surprised you?

RVA: What has surprised both of us is soccer. When we started, it was almost non-existent. Now it is a huge sport – and becoming more and more popular.

LJC: The face of athletics changes, sports become popular and unpopular. They wax and wane. Gymnastics for men and women is a contracting sport. Same with wrestling. To the wrestler on the team, it is the only thing that exists. In the world, wrestling is waning. It is not waning because of Title IX, but because of poor administrative decisions.

FGN: How long will you continue to track the data?

RVA: We were going to stop after 25 years and colleagues said, “You can’t do that!” People trust us. That level of trust has developed because we always keep our word.

By Laura Pappano

In a sports culture in which OBP, ERA, PR, SOG, QB Ratings (among others) rule the landscape, Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta track stats you won’t catch among box scores, but that have served a generation: Women’s access to play and power in college athletics.

“There isn’t a Congressional hearing or scholarly work on the issue of women in coaching and administration that doesn’t cite their research,” Donna Lopiano, former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, shared in an e-mail.

Beginning in 1977 using pencil and paper (the second year they switched to IBM punch cards and now use  actual modern computers), Acosta and Carpenter have made a career of surveying Division I, II, and III colleges to record women’s participation on the field and in coaching and administrative suites. They have tallied numbers and types of women’s teams, percentages of female head coaches plus paid and unpaid assistant coaches, and athletic directors. In 1994 (in a nod to an increasingly complex college sports structure) they added percentages of females in sports information director and athletic trainer roles.

In other words, these two women whose own sports experiences – as players, coaches, researchers, administrators, professors (Acosta has a PhD and Carpenter a PhD and law degree) – could shape a compelling narrative of the rise of women’s athletics, have through their data done something even more valuable: Made concrete the wins and losses for the women’s sports movement since the Title IX era began in earnest.

Their longitudinal data, said Lopiano, has provided “critical factual evidence of the absence of progress in opening the highest status and highest paying coaching position to females in college sports.” She says “there is no comparable work like it in the field” and is why “the advocates of Title IX continue to use and depend on this data.”

The project began — as many important things do — by chance.

Shortly after the passage of Title IX,  Acosta was waiting to speak at a conference organized by the AIAW, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (it governed women’s college sports until the NCAA took over in the 1980s).

“I was eavesdropping and I heard someone say, ‘Have you noticed how many men are coaching women’s teams?’ and someone else said, ‘Yeah. Has a study been done on this?’ – and a little light bulb went off,” Acosta recalled last month during an interview at the lakeside home she shares with Carpenter.  “I went to Linda and said, ‘We can do this. All we have to do is count!’”

Counting, of course, was (and is) a mammoth task that takes months. Even today, while they use computers to sort and tally data, all the surveys are sent out on paper because, says Acosta, “people expect it and it takes them 10 minutes.” The next round of surveys will be mailed in a few weeks (see photo above of Carpenter and Acosta in Carpenter’s office with surveys). They collect two year’s worth of data each time and make their reports available for free online. Click here for the most recent.

In it, Acosta and Carpenter note that 2008 marked the “highest ever participation by female athletes” with 9010 women’s teams, or an average of 8.65 per school (most popular women’s team offered by colleges, in order: Basketball, volleyball, soccer, cross country, softball).

At the same time, however, the representation of females as coaches of women’s teams “remains low.” When Title IX was passed in 1972, over 90 percent of head coaches of women’s teams were women. Today, it’s 42.8 percent. A few other results of note:

–  21.3 percent of athletic directors are women, up from 18.6 in 2006
–  Only 27.3 percent of head athletic trainers are females
–  Only 11.3 percent of head sports information directors are female
–  Only 2-3 percent of head coaches of male teams are female (while 57.2 percent of women’s teams have a male head coach)

Check out Acosta & Carpenter’s article in Academe (journal of the American Association of University Professors), looking back on 37 years since the passage of Title IX.

Coming Tomorrow:  Q & A with Acosta and Carpenter

Last spring, an op-ed published in the Christian Science Monitor — “The Price Gap Between Men and Women’s Basketball Tickets is Madness” — drew a slew of responses and comments, including some that were awfully hostile about the prospect of women’s play being 1) worthwhile watching and 2)  just as compelling competition as male play, and 3) certainly not worth disrespecting by enforcing a tradition of simply charging less because players are female.

The point here is not to rehash the old debate, but to deliver on the promise of a full study. A part of the Wellesley Centers for Women Working Paper Series, I have collaborated with methodolgist Allison J. Tracy, PhD, to produce a paper, “Ticket Office Sexism: The Gender Gap in Pricing for NCAA Division I Basketball.” We reviewed the ticket prices for men’s and women’s DI basketball for last season and considered the entry fees charged by 292 institutions at various seating levels, including season ticket packages and single game tickets.

An excerpt from the abstract:

Our results showed significant gender gaps at every pricing and seating level with colleges charging a premium for male play. This gap persisted even among teams identified by the NCAA as top-ranked women’s teams with large fan followings. Analysis of attendance figures further showed that the gender differential in price across schools is not accounted for by differences in attendance. Because athletics, and particularly college basketball, have an increasingly prominent cultural profile, the practice of effectively de-valuing women on the court has implications off the court as well. The results support the broader contention that women athletes – as women in traditionally male arenas – continue to face institutional discrimination that is camouflaged as sensible economic practice.

A key point: While sale of college basketball tickets appears on the surface to be no different than the sale of a ticket to an NBA game or other professional sport, such an assumption ignores the fact that colleges do not operate as pure businesses but are non-profits receiving public benefits and, in some cases, even public institutions supported by taxpayer dollars.

As Gordon C. Winston, professor of economics at Williams College, has argued, “the standard economic intuition and analogies, built on an understanding of profit-making firms and the economic theory that supports it, are likely to be a poor guide to understanding higher education.” (Winston, Gordon C. “Subsidies, Hierarchy and Peers: The Awkward Economics of Higher Education.” Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter 1999): 13-36).

The paper is available for a fee by clicking here.

A reader writes: “…there is also a big gap between the quality of play for men’s and women’s college b-ball…and thus the price disparity.”

Absolutely, men’s college basketball is a fast-paced exciting game and male players on average may be bigger and faster and jump higher than female players. And yeah, the McDonald All-Stars would beat top women’s teams. But then, the L.A. Clippers (18-58) would beat any of the top men’s college teams by 50 points.

The matter here is not about bigger, faster, stronger, but about competition because that’s what we pay to watch. People leave blowouts at halftime. We watch college ball – men’s or women’s – because – well – it’s college ball. It doesn’t matter that it’s unlikely that a single player on Villanova will end up in the NBA; they were fun to watch because they brought a good competitive game to their opponents (at least while the run lasted). And the women do that, too.

THE TAXPAYER ISSUE: Let’s play fair with public benefits

Before we start creating derivatives based on the worthiness of various college men’s premium seating plans, let’s get hold of a key fact: College basketball exactly ISN’T a free market system. March Madness bracket betting (plus those massive salaries for men’s coaches) camouflage the fact that college sports are part of educational institutions that receive public funds and tax benefits as non-profits.

I’m not sure many female taxpayers – if they thought about it – would be so excited about using their earnings to feed differential treatment of women based on the historic fact that men’s teams have been more heavily supported, promoted, and publicized. The presumption that fans don’t want to watch women’s basketball is based on…what? That they are scheduled, priced, and promoted as lite fare?

THE TICKET PRICE ISSUE: Not a call to scalp the fans…!

Just because I point out that, controlling for attendance (some folks may have missed that part), most colleges charge twice as much to see men’s basketball as women’s basketball is not a mandate to double the price of women’s tickets. Rather, it’s a call to look at what we’re saying when we accept such a huge pricing disparity (hint: it’s about more than tickets).

Interestingly enough, several D1 colleges have an appealing alternative: They charge the same to attend men’s and women’s games. (Check out Louisiana Tech, Campbell University, Central Connecticut State University, Grambling State, University of Hartford, just to name a few…) Maybe if tickets to college basketball more reflected their role within a university setting – rather than as mini-pro enterprises – more fans could appreciate (and attend) both games.