More women in sport? More female coaches please

Let’s rehash an old Hollywood standard. Tortured by his own genius, the gifted-but-flawed sports coach argues himself out of the big leagues. The powers-that-be decide to mete out the worst punishment they can think of …

They send him to coach the women.

There’s a tradition. For male sports coaches, the stepping stone (if you’re being kind) or the booby prize (if you’re not) is working with women.

For female coaches, the ceiling is any job a man doesn’t want. Working with women is as good as it gets. Infrastructure, legacy and culture … it’s all wired that way.

New dawn?

We began February 2021 with news that UK Sport has appointed 27 female coaches from 15 sports to a special leadership programme. They want to “more than double” the number of elite female coaches in sport before Paris 2024.

“More than double” … it tells you something about where we are.

It’s good news, sure, but there’s still a mountain to climb. Recent data from UK Sport tells us that women currently occupy just 10 per cent of coaching positions in Olympic and Paralympic sport. In sport as a whole – from community and grassroots to amateur and professional – just 30 per cent of coaches are female.

Newly qualified male coaches outnumber newly qualified female ones by five-to-one. Does all this trickle down? You betcha. Currently, just one in 10 UK girls currently plays enough sport that it benefits their health.

Even if coach numbers begin to balance, legacy biases in infrastructure, culture and perception remain.

“Women understand how other women tick”

Why would we want to increase the number of female coaches? Well to quote Baz Moffat, former Team GB rower and co-founder at The Well, “I only had one female coach during my rowing career, but she was the one who gave me the confidence to succeed in sport.”

Judy Murray has written extensively on the plight of women in sport in the pages of The Daily Telegraph, one of several media platforms now championing the mission.

In late 2020 she laid it out nicely: “When looking for people that worked within British tennis to come in as manager, PR, video analyst, physio or fitness trainer, I couldn’t find any women. I had to take an all-male team – and they were all brilliant, don’t get me wrong – but it really opened my eyes and made me ask, where are the women?

“We are different physiologically and emotionally than men, and one of my big things that I’ve continued to try to speak out about is the need for more women in the sporting workforce. Because women were once girls and women understand how other women tick.”

Offering an example, Murray explained how Victoria Pendleton felt so uncomfortable opening up to her male coaches, she offloaded to the lady who worked in reception at the training centre.

Second rate by culture and nuance

Women’s place in sport is enforced by subtle and not-so-subtle stereotypes and legacy prejudice. Flying the flag for not-so-subtle, let’s jump back to 2014 and another Murray – Andy. When news broke he’d chosen a female coach, a barrage of texts flew in from fellow tennis pros:

“I can’t believe you’re playing this game with the media,” Murray was told. “You should tell them tomorrow you’re considering working with a dog.”

In 2021, you don’t get much higher in sport than Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Olympic organising committee. Quizzed on why his committee was only 20 per cent women (not its stated goal of 40 per cent) he replied something akin to women talk too much.

Former pro-footballer and boxing champion Stacey Copeland was the first British woman to win the Commonwealth female super-welterweight title in 2018. In her 2020 TEDx Talk she spoke about her lifechanging victory being instantly desecrated when she was presented not with a championship belt – boxing’s emblem of prestige – but with a laminated photo of one.

Copeland also shone light on the fact women in boxing women have to take a pregnancy test before a fight (whether she’s on her period or not) and that the authorities learn the results before she does.

On their own, these instances are ridiculous. Together they paint a picture. They point at a culture of disdain that’s been allowed to fester in the gap. These relatively recent examples are why we need the female counterweight at all levels of sport.

But to-date, some 53 per cent of English professional sports clubs have no women at all on their boards, a quarter of taxpayer-funded sports organisations don’t meet government gender diversity targets and, currently, less than 4 per cent of all sport industry CEOs are women.

To quote triple medallist Dina Asher-Smith “if you don’t see it, you’re not aware that it’s there.”

Positive case studies are emerging

We’ve seen a lot of light in recent years. Women’s rugby and jiujitsu are very positive case studies. In soccer, the last Women’s World Cup was a breakthrough. We just had a female referee at the Superbowl, arguably the world’s most iconic sporting event. Today, four in every five sports now offer the same prize monies in the women’s game as the men’s.

Improvements across the board, no doubt. But it’ll take time and commitment for culture and perception to grow up and trickle down. For now, female coaches are very much swimming upstream.

So the next time you see a female coach, give her a hug. So long as it’s consensual and somehow socially distanced. Why? Because she’s a rare breed. She’s an outlier.

She’s someone who has defied the odds in journeying through a system that isn’t, culturally or institutionally, designed for her. During her training she was a second-class citizen whose ceiling was any coaching job a man didn’t want.

Whether she knows it or not she may have been compared with a dog.

So give your female coach some love. And appreciate that while there’s much good yet to come, the journey here’s been more struggle than strive. We need more of her. She’s special.