NEW YORK, NY Jan. 1 (DPI) – A NYT op-ed kept up the site’s identity-politics drumbeat as two women sports coaches and an academic wrote that women make better sports coaches, there aren’t enough of them, and the system should set aside jobs for them.

But most readers – or at least the most popular posts of many readers – pushed back, asserting there is no great conspiracy against women in sports, and that coaching at most levels of sports is a volunteer service that’s long been open to virtually everyone.

The most popular comment on NYTimes.com pointed to the lack of hard evidence for the op-ed’s premise:

Perhaps data generated by peer-reviewed research would be helpful, asking individual women why they do not coach. Opinions can be turned into hypotheses that can be tested by the research. Then we would have some facts from women on which to base our thoughts and policies.

Hey, it starts in little league and rec ball. In my town the dads want to coach their daughters (because they all secretly think their daughter will eventually get a sports scholarship) and they make it hard for the moms to coach because the dads bond with each other and believe they are better at coaching because they are men. The girls see this from t-ball on. The moms just go along to get along not looking at the big picture of how this affects their daughters’ view of leadership. I helped coach and saw this first hand. We need to show our daughters how to lead, from day 1.

This article commits the sin of assuming that because a gender imbalance exists at the coaching level, that it must have been caused by discrimination— that plenty of good female coach candidates are being passed over for equally or even less than qualified male candidates. But there could be other reasons for the imbalance— maybe the recent increased opportunities in other career fields are attracting the best women for coaching jobs for example. More information is needed about the imbalance before it can be used as evidence of it’s own failure.

Since 100% of games are “won”. It is laughable to suggest that more games could be won with women coaches.

Simple: women don’t want the role. Women have been admitted on an equal basis to medical school for decades but the proportion of women practicing surgery (particularly surgery in high-risk/high-reward specialities) is nil. Not small. It is nil as in I have never seen a woman surgeon in my given speciality since 1982. In the interim, there has been an influx of women entering specialities considered more “feminine” such as ob/gyn and pediatrics. Women as a group don’t respond well to being told what they are supposed to do and what to want. I am sure in the fullness of time, they’ll meander over to coaching but as in other human endeavors, this isn’t prone to central planning.