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Does Gender Matter? Examining the Impact of Coach Gender on Team Success: Evidence from the NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament

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Abstract

We examine the impact of coach gender on the probability that NCAA Division I women’s basketball teams advance to the end-of-year NCAA tournament. Results of our full sample analysis show that coach gender has no significant impact on the likelihood of advancing, providing no evidence for ability as a potential explanation for the decline in women coaches. In the subsample analysis, while we find that men coaches have higher predicted probabilities of tournament appearances in non-Power Five conferences, women coaches are more successful in the elite Power Five conferences, where they have been losing the most ground in coaching positions.

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Notes

  1. Teams in our full sample of over 330 teams either compete in Power Five conferences or do not complete in Power Five conferences. Therefore, together the two subsamples of teams in Power Five conferences and teams in non-Power Five conferences constitute our full sample.

  2. To determine the gender of the coach, we reviewed written statements about each coach in which pronouns were used to refer to the coach. If the pronouns used were she, her, hers, or herself, the coach was identified as a woman. If the pronouns used were he, him, his, or himself, the coach was identified as a man.

  3. Future studies may consider examining whether there are any differences in factors which impact teams which make it into the tournament via automatic bids versus being selected by the selection committee (see Shapiro et al. 2009).

  4. We also checked the robustness of our findings by controlling for additional institution-specific variables, including the total number of undergraduate student enrollment, the ratio of women to men students in each school, whether a school has a football program, and expenditure that the school spends on their football program, and the results are confirmed for all samples.

  5. The Power Five conferences are Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten Conference, Big Twelve Conference, Pacific Twelve Conference, and Southeastern Conference.

  6. There are currently a total of 348 Division I women’s basketball teams. Notice that several of these schools in the NCAA Division I women’s basketball division had missing data and therefore were not included in our sample. Nevertheless, we have information for over 330 of these teams in our data set. Consequently, our sample represents over 90 percent of the full population of women’s Division I basketball teams.

  7. Note that the 2023 NCAA end-of-season tournament consisted of 68 teams as the field has since been expanded.

  8. We also re-estimated equation 3 without time fixed effects and the results are overall similar across all specifications (see columns 2, 4, and 6 of Table 2).

  9. Furthermore, we check the robustness of our finding by replacing the variable coach tenure with a dummy variable if the team head coach is a new coach and the results are confirmed for all samples.

  10. As a robustness check, we replace the variable team expenditure that the school spends on their women’s basketball program with team expenditure that the school spends on their men’s basketball program and total expenditure that the school spends on all their athletic programs and the results are consistent for all samples.

  11. It is important to note that “it is erroneous to determine the statistical significance of the difference between two statistics based on overlapping confidence intervals (Knezevic 2008, p. 1).” Thus, to compare the two predictive margins, we calculated the 95 percent confidence interval for the difference in the predictive margins (see, for details, Knezevic 2008).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editor (Cynthia Bansak) and four anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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  1. Bryant University, 1150 Douglas Pike, Smithfield, RI, 02917, USA

    Laura Beaudin & Aziz N. Berdiev

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  1. Laura Beaudin
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Correspondence to Laura Beaudin.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6.

Table 6 The Impact of Coach Gender on the Probability of Tournament Appearance
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Beaudin, L., Berdiev, A.N. Does Gender Matter? Examining the Impact of Coach Gender on Team Success: Evidence from the NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament. Eastern Econ J 50, 135–153 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-024-00265-6

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