Kayley Grabowski
Ph.D Candidate
Job Market Candidate, 2025-2026
Economics
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Fields: Labor, Public, Sports, and Gender Economics
References: Ben Ost, Darren Lubotsky, Javaeria Qureshi
Job Market Paper: Female Athletic Directors and Expenditure on Women’s Sports
Abstract: This paper examines how women in leadership positions influence gender-based resource allocation in collegiate athletics. Using novel, hand-collected data on athletic directors matched to detailed administrative data on spending, I provide the first estimates of how a female athletic director affects resource distribution. Implementing a difference-indifference model, I find that the hiring of a female athletic director leads to a reduction in total athletic expenditures, with spending on women’s sports declining by 4.5%. At a Division I institution, this translates to an average reduction of approximately $300,000—comparable to the annual budget of a lower-profile sport such as women’s fencing. However, expenditure on men’s sports also declined, resulting in no significant change in the share of total spending allocated to women’s sports. These findings suggest that the observed reductions are unlikely to stem from gender-based discrimination.