Have you look at the officials roster for EVERY game over the last 15 years? Or do you just study all (8 I think they're up to in Big 12?) officials' faces to determine their gender? I know I've seen a couple female officials this season in NCAA games (can't recall if they were Big 12), and they're not always easy to pick apart from the men.
And I don't think it's fair to blame the Big 12 for lack of female officials, when there are probably VERY few females even qualified to officiate at that level. I've been officiating high school football the last couple years, and there just aren't many females interested in the job. In the association I belong to of ~200 officials, there are less than 5 female members. It sounds like you're advocating for the Big 12 to seek out female officials, and hire them regardless of if they're the best candidate or not.
I'm all for women doing whatever careers they so choose, but think it's ludacris to hire based on nothing but gender (or race) just to get a predetermined number or percentage. Especially when there is such a small number of that gender interested in the career to begin with.
The lack of women in officiating in football I can buy as valid.
I want to clarify that I'm not advocating for quotas or percentages. I don't think that'd be necessary at all.
I would advocate for recruiting more women who are qualified to apply and making sure your selection criteria wasn't inherently biased away from them.
I think there are plenty of females who officiate wbb that call a much better game than many of the regulars in the mens game.
I'd be in favor of recruiting to get qualified applicants from pools of candidates like the womens game and then assigning them games exactly how they are today. I believe the conference grades out officials after each game and makes future assignments accordingly. No need at all to have favoritism in that system, do it entirely on merit. But i think it starts by attracting and offering talent the chance to be graded in the first place. Especially in bb where there are so many non conference "buy" games to vette and develop a deeper talent pool to draw from in conference play.
Free market wise the competition should yield better results. More competition = higher quality of official.
I admittedly have not looked at every big 12 official assignment to see how many females have been assigned. I have however watched pretty much every ISU game in that time plus other conference teams and can recall 0 in that time (i may be forgetting a couple or may not have noticed). That would account for >10% of B12 games in that timeframe. I would think that is a large enough sample to safely say there are very few if any actively reffing b12 games.
Additionally if in that time i didn't notice a female officiating I'd say that's a sign of a quality official. If i know the official that's generally a bad thing in terms of quality.
