That is little surprise considering baseball has long been an industry controlled by men. But women are increasingly becoming a presence in the sport.

Forty percent of the professional employees at Major League Baseball’s central office are women (the highest percentage since 2008), and 21 women had on-field coaching or player development roles for organizations entering 2020 (up from just three in 2017), according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

Still, that institute’s latest report card gave M.L.B. and its 30 teams a C grade for gender hiring. A look at the gender breakdown at the club vice president-level jobs shows why: Of roughly 500 vice president jobs among the 30 clubs, 95 were held by women, according to the report. And a woman has yet to break through as an M.L.B. player, manager or general manager.

‘I had no clue there were so many women’

It was that lack of midlevel opportunities, in part, that led Wolf to start the WhatsApp group.

In 2018, she left her job as the coordinator for minor league and international operations for the Mets to look for work elsewhere in the industry. But she found that baseball’s efforts for women were geared more toward entry-level and executive positions. At the annual industrywide winter meetings in December, she said, she could not even attend an M.L.B.-run event for women because she wasn’t employed by a team at the time.

She realized women needed help in this tricky part of their careers — the steppingstones of middle management — not just at the highest or lowest positions.

“Major League Baseball has done a lot to get women and minorities into the game, but there isn’t as much support for those who are already in the game,” she said. “And I had a lot of female friends or colleagues or peers that may have had one bad experience with a club or something and then decided not to work in baseball anymore.”

Source: New York Times

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