Last year all the women’s Final Four teams in the NCAA basketball tournament had male coaches, the only time since the tournament began in 1982 that such a thing has happened. But rather than being an anomaly, it signifies a disturbing trend in women’s sports: Fewer women are coaching women’s teams. But women aren’t leaving women’s games to coach men — that’s nearly unheard of on the collegiate and professional levels and is pretty rare in youth and high school sports, too. A couple of years ago, Nicole LaVoi, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, pegged the number of women coaching boys teams nationally at around 10 percent. For those women who coach men on the collegiate level, most do so because the teams are coed. Teresa Phillips took over for a single night in 2003, when the interim coach of the Tennessee State Tigers was suspended and needed to be replaced. There are exceptions on the professional level, but they simply prove the rule. Becky Hammon and Nancy Lieberman, both assistant coaches in the NBA, and Kathryn Smith, an assistant coach in the NFL, come quickly to mind.

Forty-five years after the passage of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at schools and universities, entire generations of women are more experienced and knowledgeable about sports than ever before. The idea that women aren’t sport-savvy enough to lead teams is no longer a valid excuse, if it ever was. The numbers don’t lie, though. In 1972, 90% of the coaches for women’s team were women; by 2012, the figure was closer to 43%. As Terrance F. Ross at The Atlantic put it, “male coaches have actually benefited from Title IX and the growth in participation of female student athletes.” This is even true for sports in which the majority of teams and players are women, like volleyball. When female sports got infrastructure and money (though less, of course, than men’s sports), men showed up in bigger numbers to coach, and they continue to do so.

Why, then, don’t women coach men, and why do fewer women coach women’s teams?

Three and a half years ago, Nicole Auerbach of USA Today looked into why women don’t coach men on the top Division I level in collegiate basketball. The answer, in part, is because women rarely if ever apply for jobs on men’s teams, which greatly hinders their chances of making it onto a coaching staff. “Then, because there are no women coaching men’s teams, there are no female role models encouraging others to cross gender lines,” Auerbach wrote. In turn, few women apply for sports jobs and so on. She also found that as men enter the women’s game and take up spots there, “more female coaches have felt pressure to stay in the women’s game.”

Another factor is that people generally hire people who remind them of themselves and whom they already know. Most head coaches are hired by athletic directors, and most athletic directors in this country are men — and they hire men. Then those head coaches hire their assistants; they hire men, too.

At the same time, female coaches are held to different standards than male coaches and have more dubious job security. Last year Annie Brown wrote an extensive report for Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, that showed a troubling pattern: Female coaches speak out about unequal treatment of women’s teams and then face poor performance reviews or, worse, accusations of “mistreating or verbally abusing their players.” This doesn’t mean to suggest that female coaches can’t be abusive; some are, and speaking out against discrimination does not mean one can’t also be abusive. It’s worth considering, though, whose behavior gets labeled “abusive” and whose does not, and who ultimately gets punished for it.