Women’s Leadership Emergence: Age Cohort Analyses and the Impacts of Title IX

• In Event: Education, Political Participation and Values

Abstract

How did the implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 impact the roles of influence that American women inhabit in US society? Specifically, how does sports participation during youth and young adulthood shape the emergence of leadership traits and roles in women’s adult lives? This paper reports the findings of original, collaborative research in the United States between scholars and research staff at the Women’s Sports Foundation, a research-driven, national non-profit whose aim is to advance the lives of women and girls through sport and physical activity.

Using a nationally representative study (N=2500) of American women (ages 20-80) who participated in youth sports between the ages of 5 and 26, recruited across six cohorts (roughly 415 women per decade-long cohort in their 20s, 30s, etc.), this study investigates the impacts of athletic participation on adult leadership across society. We conceptualize "leadership" as broadly construed and measured across formal appointments to more informal spheres of community influence in multiple sectors, including education and community organizations, politics, medicine, entrepreneurship, business, and elsewhere. Previous research demonstrates that youth sports participation is a key factor in women's leadership emergence among business and political elites (e.g., Ernst and Young 2017), yet there remains a lacuna in research investigating the impacts of youth sports participation on women's adult community leadership (formal and informal) within the general population. We theorize that youth, high school, collegiate, and club sports participation among participants imparts a host of developmental skills and experiences which, in turn, inform the emergence of leadership traits, skills, and roles in adulthood. Scholars demonstrate that sports participation in adolescence increases women's educational attainment, workforce participation, and mental and physical health (e.g., Stevenson 2007, 2010; Kaestner and Xu 2010; Clarke and Ayers 2014). Furthermore, the exogenous implementation of Title IX has dramatically liberalized access to sports for American girls and women over the past half-century (see Druckman and Sharrow 2023; Schultz 2014), broadening the potential impacts of sports participation across the population. This history suggests questions about the durable impacts of sports participation (e.g., on what factors might it be contingent? How prevalent are leadership roles among women who were former sports participants in the mass public, compared to elites?) that relate directly to the “feedback effects” of public policy.

Political science research has largely focused on Title IX’s feedback effects on legislative behavior, policy opinion, and discourses of sex and gender in the US (Druckman, Rothschild, and Sharrow 2016; Druckman and Sharrow 2020, 2023; Rose 2018; Sharrow 2017, 2021a, 2021b). Yet research into the cross-cohort impacts of the pre- and post-Title IX effects stemming from increased sports participation remains scant. Aligned with theories of policy feedback and youth development (e.g., Mettler 2005; Mettler and Soss 2004; Beland et al 2022; Burns et al 2001), this study employs an original, cross-sectional research design and a multi-generational sample to explore how youth athletic participation correlates with an array of adult leadership outcomes (across community, business, political, public and private sectors) in six cohorts of women, aged 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79.

Much colloquial knowledge suggests that athletic participation accrues experiences with teamwork, goal setting, communication, resilience, etc. that then shape—or, over time and due to the implementation of public policy under Title IX, “feedback” into—the leadership capacity of adults later in life, yet little scholarship empirically investigates this. Scholars of policy feedback find that policy, over the life course, can have major impacts on social capital, civic participation, and educational attainment (e.g., (Mettler 2005; Rose 2018). Yet most research on the impacts of Title IX has rarely focused on constituent outcomes (but see Druckman and Sharrow 2023). Using a multiple cohort, quasi-experimental research design that examines the impacts of increased incidence of athletic opportunity available under the implementation of Title IX, these data provide unique insights into both leadership emergence and policy feedback effects. This paper reveals substantial opportunity within the policyscape of Title IX to investigate feedback outcomes across generations, and across sectors, bringing new insights into the ways in which public policy shapes the gendered experience of adult citizenship. It also opens new questions for researchers of gender and U.S. politics who are interested in how public policy subtly and unevenly shapes the contours of leadership and hierarchy in American life.

Authors

• Elizabeth A. Sharrow, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Bridgette Davis, University of Massachusetts Amherst