Miltenberg, Davis, Vinci, Federico: “Harvard Sued by Former Women’s Hockey Coach Over Alleged Sex Discrimination,” The Wall Street Journal

Over nearly three decades coaching Harvard’s women’s hockey team, Katey Stone established herself as one of the game’s most successful coaches. The Crimson were an annual force, winning a national championship and recording four more runners-up during her tenure, which also included a stint coaching the U.S. to a silver medal at the Sochi Olympics. That run, which saw her become the fourth-winningest coach in the sport’s history, came to an abrupt end last year in the wake of media reports that painted an ugly picture of the culture within the program, including alleged hazing incidents. Now Stone is suing Harvard over her exit. Stone’s sex discrimination suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, accuses the school of forcing her out over false allegations, which is “part and parcel of a larger culture at the University wherein female coaches are undervalued, underpaid, heavily scrutinized, and held to a breathtakingly more stringent standard of behavior than their male counterparts,” the complaint says. It’s a sign of how thorny abuse allegations in sports can become for any organization—but particularly in higher education, where individual universities are primarily responsible for investigating and responding to claims, with the NCAA and Department of Education watching over them for missteps. In recent years, a cultural shift has taken hold across sports as various scandals have prompted new scrutiny of coaching practices that were once considered normal. Stone’s suit says that the university has held male coaches as separate from their players’ inappropriate conduct, and at times looked past allegations they had been abusive toward players, but that she was criticized and disciplined for incidents that took place on her team that she didn’t know about. She also says that she was paid significantly less than male coaches for years, and while the disparity was eventually corrected, she wasn’t compensated for time she had lost out. “Where female coaches, such as Coach Stone, are expected to be nurturing toward their female players and coach with compassion and sensitivity, male coaches are allowed to be ‘tough’ and hold their male players accountable for their actions, level of play, and effort,” the complaint said. “Defendant Harvard has granted some male coaches a free pass to coach, motivate, and speak to Defendant Harvard’s male student athletes as the male coaches see fit.” The administrators involved in evaluating the incidents involving Stone include Claudine Gay, who later served as Harvard’s president until resigning earlier this year amid plagiarism allegations and backlash over her response to antisemitism on campus. 

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