A Record Number Of Women Are Working In The NFL This Year. They’re Changing The Sport For The Better

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The week-three matchup between the Cleveland Browns and the Washington Football Team on September 27, 2020, was a welcome return to what felt like pre-pandemic times. The teams traded the lead throughout the game, until the Browns scored 17 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to win 34–20. There were only 6,000 fans in attendance in Cleveland—a mark of COVID-19 protocols still in place—but the weather was warm, the sun was shining, and football was back. And for the first time in the history of the National Football League, women played an on-field role in every part of it.

On the Browns’ sideline stood Callie Brownson, chief of staff for first-year head coach Kevin Stefanski, serving as the liaison between him and team operations. Across the field was Jennifer King, assistant running backs coach for Washington (recently renamed the Commanders), the first Black woman to coach full-time in the league. Between them, on the officiating squad, was down judge Sarah Thomas. It was the first time ever that three women took the field in an official capacity for a regular season game.

“That was such an incredible day,” Brownson tells Women’s Health. “I told somebody afterward, ‘That was such a great culmination of a moment for all of us.’ That bond between myself and Jen King and Sarah Thomas and all these women [that are working in the NFL] started so many years ago, in such a grassroots way, where none of us really knew where everything was going to take us.”

Brownson’s and King’s journeys had aligned more than once in the years leading up to that historic moment. In September 2018, Brownson was promoted from a coaching intern to offensive quality control coach at Dartmouth College, becoming the first woman to coach full-time in NCAA Division I football. When she left that job to intern with the Buffalo Bills, King was hired in her place. They’d also crossed paths at the NFL’s Women’s Careers in Football Forum, a yearly, invite-only conference, started in 2017, that connects women working in football with head coaches, general managers, and executives in the league to expand the hiring pool for women in a male-dominated environment.

“To stand on the sideline with [King] and with Sarah and be like, ‘Holy crap, if you had asked us this four years ago, would we have said that this was going to happen?’ It was kind of cool,” Brownson says. “It’s important, and it started years ago at the creation of the Women’s Careers in Football Forum.”

While the game was a significant step forward for women working in the NFL, Brownson and King didn’t fight their way into the league with the goal of being firsts. They love the game, they’re damn good at what they do, and their main objective is the same as any team leader’s: to win. “I never ever, literally never, thought about being a first,” says King. “I just wanted to coach football.”

Brownson and King both say their experiences working and coaching in the NFL have changed them—but with their unique points of view, they’re also changing the NFL. And they’re not alone. Twelve of the 792 assistant coaching positions in preseason training camp belonged to women, the highest number in league history, with 6 of those 12 staying on to start the 2021 NFL season. This year also marks record-high numbers of women working as team vice presidents, in team senior administration, and in the league office. Their presence, while still small, is making ripples that are slowly turning the tides of NFL culture, which has long been plagued by toxic masculinity. And as the number of women working in the NFL grows, those ripples will hopefully turn into tidal waves.

Taking The First Steps On A Long Road

So what do these historic numbers actually look like? In the 2021 NFL season, women made up 38.8 percent of the NFL league office, 25.3 percent of teams’ senior administration, 3.1 percent of team CEOs and presidents, and 1.5 percent of team assistant coaches, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) yearly report card. (TIDES determined these numbers during preseason, when there were 12 women working as assistant coaches in the NFL; currently 6 still are—those who didn’t stay on had temporary fellowships. Since then, the CEOs and presidents percentage has gone up, with Kristi Coleman being promoted from CFO to president of the Carolina Panthers. Also worth nothing: There has never been a woman head coach or general manager in the NFL.) If those numbers don’t sound very large, that’s because they aren’t—at least, it’s far from equal representation—but it’s taken years of hard work behind the scenes to get this far. And that effort has largely been led by the women already working in the industry.
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Five years ago, there were fewer women working at every level of the NFL, with only one full-time female assistant coach and zero female CEOs or presidents, according to the 2016 TIDES report. “It’s a good sign of growth and progress,” says Sam Rapoport, the NFL’s senior director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, who created the Women’s Careers in Football Forum. But “we all know that we’re not where we want to be—and we won’t be until we reach 50 percent across the board in every position.”

Women have traditionally been left out of the NFL hiring pool for many reasons, but most of them are rooted in lost networking opportunities, nepotism, and misogyny. “It used to be, ‘I have no idea where to find a woman who’s interested in football,’” Rapoport says. “I think men are still getting jobs because they’re having beers at the Super Bowl, at the Senior Bowl, or they’re golfing together, or doing certain things women are typically disenfranchised from.”

But women are interested in football, now more than ever. In 2013, more than 40 percent of NFL fans were women—as of 2020, that number has grown to 47 percent. Still, being a die-hard fan of the game does not necessarily make anyone, of any gender, an expert in X’s and O’s. For many, learning the game on a deeper level involves playing it—and forming a network of coaches and mentors along the way. It’s a “framework that our male colleagues have kind of automatically,” says Lori Locust, assistant defensive line coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who became one of the first woman coaches to win a Super Bowl in 2021. “They played football with these guys in college, or ‘I coached his son at this program,’ or ‘His dad and I were together and we did this or that.’ We don't have that.”

For the record, Locust did play semi-pro women’s football. In fact, the majority of the six women coaches in the NFL have similar playing experience, as well as years of coaching under their belts. “I think that's the biggest misconception sometimes, just because people don’t know who we are or how much we’ve put into this in the past,” Locust says. She was a high school football assistant coach for almost a decade, as well as in men’s indoor and arena leagues, before landing her first NFL internship with the Baltimore Ravens in 2018. “It’s kind of like, ‘How did they get that job?’ Well, dude, I was coaching for like 13 years. That’s how I got this job. I didn’t just up and decide to do it.”

Breaking Into The ‘Old Boys’ Club’

Ask any woman who has been hired to work in the NFL in the past five years about their career journey and, at some point, they will probably tell you about the day they met Rapoport. She has spent those five years fully immersed in developing female talent, building a pipeline for women to break into roles that have been traditionally held by men.

A lifelong fan of the game, Rapoport played football herself for most of her life growing up in Canada. By the time she entered adulthood and was named captain and quarterback of a women’s professional tackle team, the Montreal Blitz, she knew she wanted to work in the highest levels of American football. She notoriously mailed a football with her résumé attached to the NFL league office. She’d written a note on the ball that read, “What other quarterback could accurately deliver a pass 386 miles?” Rapoport scored her first NFL internship after that move, and she’s been working in football ever since, with a goal of bringing more women on board with her.

Rapoport’s brainchild, the Women’s Careers in Football Forum, launched at the 2017 Pro Bowl as a vehicle to connect women who were already working in football in some capacity with top names in the league. Seven of the 32 NFL clubs participated in the first iteration, sending coaches and executives to speak on panels and meet with the 220 women Rapoport personally selected to attend.

Since 2017, the Forum has helped women secure 201 opportunities in football, 107 of which are roles in the NFL. Since the Forum’s inception, 31 of the 32 teams have taken part in the program, and 23 teams have hired women who participated. Rapoport also set a standard that “at minimum, 50 percent of the participants must be women of color, or we’re not hosting the program,” she says. “That’s a number one critical priority.” Over the past year, 80 percent of the women who secured opportunities in football as a result of the Forum were women of color. This season, people of color held 20.1 percent of team senior administration positions and 40.5 percent of assistant coaching positions. That’s an all-time all-time high for the NFL, but one that still needs massive improvement, especially given the recent lawsuit former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed against the NFL, alleging racism in their hiring practices, and that he was only interviewed for a head-coaching job to satisfy the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least two external minority candidates for those roles.

Receiving an invite to the Forum also doesn’t guarantee the attendee a position. “It’s still not just falling in your lap,” King says. “You still have to be able to hustle and develop those relationships to take things to the next level to get an opportunity.”

Once women do get their foot in the door, they’re typically starting off with an entry-level internship in the NFL, regardless of how many years of coaching experience they have, which can create a major barrier for entry for plenty of qualified candidates. To help women manage this period, there are now options like the Scott Pioli & Family Fund for Women Football Coaches and Scouts. Part of the Women's Sports Foundation, the fund was created and endowed by Pioli, who has served as a front-office executive for six different NFL teams, and it helps women coaches and scouts (in college and professional football) get by financially when they’re starting off on an entry-level salary. (King is a recipient.) The development of a virtual option for these internships has also expanded opportunities to a more diverse set of candidates.

While it’s no secret that hiring more women is a great PR move for the NFL, the reality is that hiring women can’t just be about optics when the goal is to win games. “This is not just about checking the box,” says Ron Rivera, head coach of the Commanders, who hired King after meeting her at the Women’s Careers in Football Forum. “This is about developing the best teams and the best coaches.”

Shifting The Culture Of The NFL

The NFL is no stranger to controversy, particularly surrounding the discriminatory work environment the league has upheld, the lack of accountability and punishment for misconduct among players, coaches, and league staff (particularly when it comes to domestic violence against women), and the slowness with which changes protecting player safety and mental health are implemented.

Of course, hiring more women isn’t the be-all and end-all solution—nor is it on women to fix these issues—but they are making a positive difference.

Take this example from Amy Trask, former CEO of the Oakland Raiders and the first woman CEO in league history. After quarterback Michael Vick was convicted of illegal dog fighting activities, Trask—an ardent animal lover—convinced then–team owner Al Davis not to sign Vick as a Raider. “What meant so much to me was he knew my passion, and he checked with me,” she recalls. It’s just one way a diverse set of perspectives in the room can change the team culture. “Diversity and inclusiveness makes a business stronger and better,” Trask says. “It’s just incomprehensible, to me, that people don’t understand that.”

When people don’t understand, you get a situation like what happened with the Raiders more recently, when an investigation uncovered a series of racist, homophobic, and misogynistic emails sent by head coach Jon Gruden over a period of several years. He promptly resigned in October, but the impact of his leadership will certainly have lasting effects. “Him being in power for that long, that sent ripple effects over decades and decades—the decisions that he might have made, the people that he said no to, the doors that he shut,” says Joy Taylor, cohost of Fox Sports 1’s The Herd with Colin Cowherd and Fox Sports Radio’s The Joy Taylor Show. “So that's why you need allies, because those kinds of people exist and are in power and have influence.”

Having women in the room making decisions—in the owners’ box, in the executives’ meetings, on the coaching staff—is important to improving not only the culture of the league, but how people in power are held accountable for their actions. “It’s not just creating more opportunities for people who deserve them,” Taylor says. “It also creates an entire world of conversation, an entire world of perspective, that protects everyone.”

An anonymous NFL general manager who had hired multiple women scouts once told Rapoport that the influx of women took the level of testosterone in the office down a notch and made his male colleagues stop engaging in some of their hypermasculine behaviors. “He said that it actually made the men perform better, because it created a more natural environment in the office that reflected these men’s home lives, or their personal lives,” she says. “When you create an environment that better reflects society, it enhances the performance of everyone.”

Some of the most powerful coaches in the league are starting to see that, and not just in terms of team management, but in how it impacts the game. “Women tend to have a calming effect,” says Rivera, noting that having King’s energy in the locker room has been a healthy change. “It tends to do something where the [team] is not amped up as much. And I think that’s also important, to have different types of personalities involved.”

Buccaneers head coach Bruce Arians agrees. He’s hired two women coaches, Locust and assistant strength and conditioning coach Maral Javadifar. “Having them on staff has just reinforced my belief that you just need to be open to trying things a little different than how they have been done in the past,” Arians said via email. “Everyone brings something different to the table. It might be life experiences, or maybe their career experiences, but drawing from those different perspectives usually helps get the best out of our players.”

Locust echoed this sentiment when describing how she and her players interact. They can lean on her for help in specific areas of their lives that they might not want to talk about with their other coaches. “We do go through things as a room when guys have had personal issues or family problems. We do try and solve them. And they’ll talk to [defensive line coach Kacy Rodgers] about certain things, and talk to me about certain things.” Positive communication is the key to a healthy, successful team, says Locust, and everyone has a responsibility to contribute to it.

King credits her past work as a police officer with molding her into a coach who can handle stressful situations with a unique level of calm. It’s one skill, among many, that could land King the role of the Commanders running backs coach in the future. “She would be the most qualified person,” Rivera says. Since then, King has successfully filled in for this position due to the current coach having to sit out to meet COVID-19 protocols.

While the pandemic has caused plenty of issues for the NFL, it’s allowed women coaches who are typically in assistant roles to step up and show how capable they are, as they take over for other coaches who are out sick. Brownson experienced this when she filled in as receivers coach during the Browns’ much-anticipated wild-card matchup against division rivals the Pittsburgh Steelers in December 2020. That game was the second time (out of three instances) that she served as a primary position coach in an NFL game; she’s the first woman ever to do so. Despite Stefanski and three other coaches being out the night the team faced the Steelers, the Browns prevailed, clinching their first playoff berth since 2002 and breaking a 17-year postseason drought, the longest in the NFL.

While Brownson has a laundry list of personal achievements to her name, that win is one of the proudest moments in her career thus far. “That’s a feeling that I don’t think I’ll ever forget as long as I live: being able to see the resilience factor in such a hard year,” she says. Brownson has been a model of that resilience too, not only stepping up to fill a coaching role when her team needed it, but doing the nonglamourous work as well, like folding towels in the equipment room when staff members were out with COVID. “With what 2020 brought to us, to me, and to this organization, we need people to be team players. Callie is a great utility player for us,” Stefanski said in a previous interview.

It’s clear that women are showing up to win and foster a healthier, more inclusive environment. And they’re pushing through stereotypes and discrimination as they do it.

Trask knows the experience well. At her first club owners’ meeting in the late ’90s, a male team owner mistook her for a member of the catering staff and asked her to get him coffee. She got it for him—and then saw that he was deservedly embarrassed when he realized she was staying for the meeting. “When I started, there were no other women in the room,” she says. Thankfully, her story has a happy ending. Trask and the team owner were able to laugh together about the incident, and “from that moment forward at every meeting we attended, he offered to get me coffee.”

Luckily, Trask is no longer the only woman in the room all the time. But there still aren’t enough women in the league yet to get rid of the questions about their ability to coach, the legitimacy of their experience, and the sincerity of their interest in the sport.

“We all, as female sports fans, get the same joke,” says Taylor. “A guy is like, ‘Oh, you’re into sports. Wow, that’s so cool. If you’re really into sports, give me the blood type of the 1986 Yankees.’ What are you talking about? This is not a trivia question. It’s nonsense.” As a result, women who work in the industry feel not only the normal weight of their jobs, but the pressure of knowing that any potential misstep will be magnified because of their gender.

“Every woman in football has a story and has had some type of obstacle,” says Venessa Hutchinson, the NFL’s senior manager of football programming and Rapoport’s right-hand woman in planning the Women’s Careers in Football Forum. “For me, at least, that’s been a little bit of the fuel to the fire. I’ve worked for people who didn’t think women belong in football, who couldn’t be bothered to remember my name, and you kind of just figure out how to maneuver those avenues. You really latch on to the people who value you.”

For many of the women working in the NFL, that means connecting with and forming community with other women staffers and coaches who understand the pressure of the environment they’re in.

“I don't think it’s just singular to football that women have to over-prove themselves about their knowledge, over-prove details about their work ethic,” Brownson says. But that can change. “As more quality women continue to get hired and move up the ladder, that narrative of ‘women don't belong’ gets quieter and quieter.”

Creating A New Model For Excellence

It’s no coincidence that the Buccaneers employ one of the most diverse staffs in football and also won a Super Bowl last season. The club also hosts a series of programs aimed at funneling more women into Rapoport’s pipeline. They’re the first NFL team to create their own academic scholarship for girls who want to pursue a career in sports, and they also host an ongoing Women’s Summit for Careers in Football modeled after Rapoport’s Forum that features master classes with senior coaching staff and club executives.

Team co-owner Darcie Glazer Kassewitz, the driving force behind the Bucs’ women-focused programming, was inspired to launch her team’s own summit when she realized many people still didn’t recognize this pipeline was possible. “I hosted an event awhile ago, and we brought a lot of our female executives to speak,” she says. “And we were talking about how many women we had in our club, and it was kind of this collective gasp from the audience that they just didn’t realize how many women were working at the Buccaneers and in high-level positions. It occurred to me at that moment that we really need to get the message out as an organization about how many jobs are available in the NFL for women.”

Arians hopes to see the model his team is creating serve as a blueprint for others. “This really is a copycat league in a lot of ways,” he says. “Once teams like ours have success bringing in diverse staffs, others will join in.” It’s worth noting that 9 of the 32 NFL clubs hired a head of diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2021, and Rapoport is already working closely with all of them to help connect viable women candidates with jobs.

At the league-office level, Rapoport and Hutchinson are also hard at work planning the virtual 2022 Women’s Careers in Football Forum. They spend each year scouring the Internet for potential participants, and Rapoport says they have a “ridiculous spreadsheet” with hundreds of candidates. Though the Forum comes around only once a year, Rapoport and Hutchinson are constantly forging new connections between women and teams that are hiring whenever an interested candidate reaches out to them. They know there is more work to be done—but ultimately, they hope the success of the program puts them out of a job. “We’re very excited for the day where the Forum is no longer needed and it’s canceled. It will be the greatest day ever,” Rapoport says. “I often think back to how I needed to get in, which was kind of the side door, and women are still needing to get in through the side door. Venessa and I are working to carve out that front door for them.”

A major turning point for the Women’s Careers in Football Forum was when New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick signed on last year, leading a virtual breakout session with Tennessee Titans head coach (and former Patriots linebacker) Mike Vrabel. “At the end, Bill typed in his email address in the [Zoom] chat and was like, ‘If you need anything, just email me,’” says Hutchinson. To have a six-time Super Bowl-winning coach, widely considered one of the greatest of all time, not only participating but being genuinely impressed by the pool of up-and-coming female talent—that’s the type of thing that will move the needle, Rapoport says. “When you land Bill Belichick, there is no reason any head coach would not participate in this,” she says. “And that is a big deal.”

For now, many of the women already working in the league have become the speakers at the very event that helped them get their start. Brownson, King, and Locust continue to participate in the Forum and mentor those coming after them—and they’ve also bonded with each other. All of them say that the support from other women in similar positions makes all the difference in feeling more comfortable and confident at work. “This career is so demanding, and it’s so isolating sometimes, and it’s so difficult to explain it to somebody who’s not in it,” Locust says. “It’s a hard thing to understand. But they do.”

Some of the women working in the league have formed a group chat to stay in touch, share encouragement before games, and just joke around in their off time. “We all talk the same language,” says Locust—that language being X’s and O’s from a woman’s perspective, which the NFL desperately needs at the moment.

“We always talk about how women need to lift each other up, and I think these women and the sisterhood that we have has been the best example of that. It’s not a competition, it’s ‘How can we continue this? How can I help you through my experience?’” Brownson says. “If the door opened for somebody, they were making sure that they sent the elevator back down, and in a way that was preparing the next one for an opportunity. And I think there’s nothing stronger than that.”

1983: Susan Tose Spencer becomes general manager, legal counsel, and vice president of the Philadelphia Eagles, the first woman GM in NFL history. She took the role to assist her father, who owned the team.

1987: After 10 years working in the Oakland Raiders’ legal department, Amy Trask is appointed chief executive officer of the team, making her the first woman to hold that position in league history.

October 1991: Katie Blackburn, daughter of Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown, begins working in the Bengals front office. She became the first woman in the league to be a chief contract negotiator.

June 2006: Sportscaster Lesley Visser becomes the first woman to be recognized by the Pro Football Hall of Fame when she receives the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award.

2014: The NFL publicly increases its diversity efforts in the wake of the Ray Rice domestic violence case.

April 8, 2015: Sarah Thomas becomes the first full-time woman official in NFL history.

July 27, 2015: The Arizona Cardinals hire Jen Welter as an assistant coach intern, making her the first woman member of an NFL coaching staff.

January 20, 2016: The Buffalo Bills promote Kathryn Smith from administrative assistant to quality control coach for special teams, making her the NFL’s first woman full-time coach.

January 2017: The NFL hosts the first annual Women’s Careers in Football Forum at the Pro Bowl in Orlando, Florida.

August 13, 2017: The San Francisco 49ers hire Katie Sowers, the first openly LGBTQ+ coach in NFL history.

August 13, 2017: The San Francisco 49ers hire Katie Sowers, the first openly LGBTQ+ coach in NFL history.

May 1, 2018: Kim Pegula is named president of Pegula Sports & Entertainment, which includes holding the title of president for both the Buffalo Bills and the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres. As a result, she becomes the first-ever women team president in both the NFL and NHL.

February 2, 2020: Sowers becomes the first woman to coach in a Super Bowl when the 49ers play in Super Bowl LIV.

September 27, 2020: For the first time in an NFL game, there were two women assistant coaches on the sidelines—Jennifer King of the Washington Football Team and Callie Brownson of the Cleveland Browns—and a woman official, Sarah Thomas, on the field.

November 29, 2020: Brownson fills in as tight ends coach and becomes the first woman to serve as an interim positions coach, making her the highest-ranking woman coach in NFL history.

January 26, 2021: The Washington Football Team promotes Jennifer King to assistant running backs coach, making her the NFL's first full-time Black woman assistant position coach.

February 7, 2021: Maral Javadifar and Lori Locust become the first women coaches to win a Super Bowl when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers win Super Bowl LV. In the same game, Thomas becomes the first woman to officiate a Super Bowl.

March 5, 2021: Maia Chaka becomes the second woman and first Black woman to be hired as an NFL official.

August 2021: Twelve women have coaching positions at 2021 NFL training camp, the highest number in league history.

December 19, 2021: Brownson and King make history again filling in as running backs coaches for their respective teams due to COVID-19 protocols. It’s the first time two women coached position groups in league history, and King became the league’s first Black woman position coach.

January 2022: The Minnesota Vikings request to interview Catherine Raiche for their open GM position, the first time a woman has been asked to do so. Raiche, the Eagles’ vice president of football operations, is believed to be the most senior-ranking woman executive in the NFL, and if hired, would be the second woman GM in league history.

February 1, 2022: The Carolina Panthers promote Kristi Coleman from chief financial officer to team president. She’s the first woman in franchise history to hold this position, and one of only two women team presidents in the league.

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