Explaining the Scarcity of Female Coaches: Barriers Part I
One of my primary areas of research pertains to the many layers of barriers that influences the scarcity of female coaches at all levels. Given the percentage of female head coaches coaching females BARELY moved (in 2010 is was 42.6%, in 2012 it is 42.9%) in the most recent update of Acosta & Carpenter’s Women in Intercollegiate Sport (2012), increasing awareness of the complexity of barriers is important. When I do coach workshops I often hear from women they feel isolated, uncertain and perhaps discriminated against. They also feel helpless to create change, which often leads to burnout, lack of enjoyment and job satisfaction, and perhaps quitting coaching altogether.
In my series of blogs in 2012 (1st Monday of each month), I will outline a few different barriers so female coaches have increased awareness of the issues they may face, so that individual, social and organizational strategies to combat those barriers can be developed and implemented. At minimum, some female coaches won’t feel they are alone in experiencing and battling these barriers, which may provide some sense of comfort and support.
1. A great piece on espn.com covered the implications of homophobia and negative recruiting that plague women’s athletics and particularly women’s basketball. I thought this piece was very well done and lays out the complexities of the issue and how it may detract females, regardless of sexual orientation, from entering and staying in coaching, as I had wrote about in a previous blog.
STRATEGY: Do not tolerate or participate in negative recruiting or disparaging remarks about lesbians. For example, when I coached at Wellesley College, and all women’s institution, I experienced gender stereotyping and negative recruiting all the time. As a young, naive, recently married coach I didn’t recognize it for what it was. Parents would often say to me, “What kind of players do you have on your team, because we heard there are a lot of lesbians here.” The parents wanted me to reassure them this was not the case, so their daughter would be “safe” coming to Wellesley (i.e., not be surrounded by lesbian teammates and a lesbian coach). Once I learned about the insidious practice of negative recruiting, I would simply say to the parents, “If you are concerned that your daughter is going to be exposed to lesbians in college, then perhaps college is not for her, and particularly Wellesley, as we value diversity here.” Enough said. Ask your lesbian colleagues how you can help fight negative recruiting.
2. A job posted in Jan 2011 in the NCAA Job Market by Rhodes College for a “Assistant Football Coach & Assistant Softball Coach” is a somewhat unusual combination. However, what is more unusual and ridiculous is the job description which states, “Bachelor’s Degree required. Must have served as a high school and/or college football coach, and be able to (learn and) coach softball.” LEARN softball?! It is a college coaching position! How would you like to be the women on that softball team? Would a job posting ever read like this, “Bachelor’s Degree required. Must have served as a high school and/or college softball coach, and be able to (learn and) coach football”? This example highlights how certain sports (in this case football) are valued over others on this particular campus, but reflects the sentiment on many other campuses. A majority of female coaches often cite feeling devalued and not supported by their administration.
STRATEGY: Fight for and suggest equal visual representation of male and female athletes and coaches in all media (print, website) and in the athletic facility.
I’ve offered one strategy for each barrier, but there are many more! I’d love to hear what you do to combat barriers so that everyone can benefit and feel supported.
15 Responses to “Explaining the Scarcity of Female Coaches: Barriers Part I”
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Nicole,
The topic of women coaching men actually came up in my Sports Law class. I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my classmates’ mouths. Of course, I had to blog about it, and I proposed a Rooney-like-Rule as an option to get more female representation in male sports (we mostly talked about NCAA men’s basketball).
What do you think about my proposal?
http://www.widerights.com/?p=1394
“The capacity of women to coach men (and the abhorrent comments made in my sports law class on the issue)”
-Pete Olsen
Pete,
Interestingly enough I posted the same question in my class…should we have a Rooney-like Rule for women coaching men? It is an interesting thought. Unfortunately the responses you listed from you law class are not uncommon. There is quite a bit of sexism exists in terms of people’s belief that women are not capable of or interested in coaching men. This will be slow to change. Keep up the good work! _Dr. LaVoi
I agree wit this post. I am an assistant softball coach for a girls JV high school team and my best friend Justine is the head women’s coach. We have two male assistants that work with us and before pretty much every game, the umpire addresses the men as head coach ignoring the fact that there are 2 other women who could be head coaches. What really bothers me about this situation is that John the more dominant assistant goes along with it and pretends that he is the head coach. Justine is 23 and John is about 45, she gets very annoyed and has spoken with him about the situation and since she has talked to him about it he has been better and allowed her to speak with the umpires and the opposing head coach, but sometimes he will ignore it and continue his actions. I just don’t understand how at every game and sometimes practices the men and women think that the men are the head coaches for our girls JV softball team, when will it end?
I believe the statistics in this article can do well in showing the disparity of female coaches when compared to male coaches in athletics. It may be as simple as to say that 100% of male teams are coached by males, but from reading this article I only assume that is the case–I actually have no idea if it is. Even more, I do not know from reading this article how many women are being refused jobs or how many find it difficult because of the barriers. A great insight into this inequity would be to interview those female coaches who have found jobs at the same time elaborating on their struggles in finding jobs due to gender differences. Wouldn’t it be supportive to have accounts of universities that portray equal representation, so that other universities could follow? I would definitely feel change will happen when Universities become known for equal rights representations as Title Ix describes.
This topic is a never ending battle. I have been a competitive female soccer player for many years and all through college. Every single one of my coaches have been male and I have noticed to be more common, especially at the higher levels such as college and professional. Through my experiences, I have observed that a male head coach coaching a female team experiences a sense of empowerment over his players. And I think that might be why you don’t see women coaching men’s teams, they may feel like they won’t be respected or looked up to with authority. I don’t know but just some ideas from what I’ve seen.
I am a student-athlete at a Division 1 college that has no female head coaches. Being surrounded by all the male coaches in authority sends out a a hidden message that entails males are supposed to be in charge, highest in power and the females involved in athletics are the assistants or secretaries. Playing along with the stereotype society has put on gender. The NCAA requires the school to have certain numbers met regarding gender equity (equality amongst athletes male to female ratio). The school has a board of diverse and mentionable representatives to meet, discuss and apply these criterion. Maybe the NCAA should consider enforcing some of these policies within the athletic department’s staff and coaches.
Just from my observations and experience I have noticed that as sports become more and more serious there is a decrease in female coaches. As an adolescent growing up in a small town nearby San Jose, California, I had participated in a variety of activities. I had only three “teams” that had a female coach. As I look back I realized that all the female coaches had a male counterpart, whether he was an assistant or the head coach. Even with the female teams hardly do I see a whole female coaching staff especially at the college level or even at the high schools. Does higher levels of competition mean less female coaches?
This was a good blog for me to read because I’ve recently discussed this topic in my psychology of coaching class and we watched two videos on women coaches (Pat Sumitt and Rene Portland). The video based on Rene Portland really amused me because of her discrimination on lesbian athletes and the fact that there was nothing done about it until after coaching for 20+ years. One thing that was discussed in this class is that since Title IX, there has been an increase female participation in sport, but a decrease in female coaches, which I thought was an interesting statistic. This subject hasn’t really hit me until that class and made me realize that during my years in high school and participation in sport, I didn’t have any female coaches. In addition, based on my observation on the amount of coaches from volunteering at numerous schools as an athletic training student, I’ve only encountered one female head coach at an all boy’s high school. This just gets me thinking about the participation of female referees and any conflict they encounter…
Although women sports is growing fairly rapidly, i feel like the reason why female coaches are still at a low ratio between men in women sports is because of dominance of male sports over female sports. In this article, i find it completely unfair that schools, especially in a college environment, undervalue women sports. Having the idea that being male and not having any game experiences in softball or to make matters worse, baseball, but just having the willingness to learn and teach softball, disgusts me that this is what qualifies an individual of being a softball coach at a collegiate level. Another fact that made matters worse was that the softball coach position made it seemed that it was more of a secondary position, the primary position being the football coach, which undervalued the sport of softball as a whole. Its a shame that we tell our kids to be what they want to be when they grow up, then devalue them when they reach that opportunity because of their sex.
I think that people, not only limited to those who are sports-related but people in general, think that female coaches are not qualified or inexperienced to coach highly competitive sports. We see many women participate in various sports; however, we only see a few competitive sports clubs or leagues for women. It indicates that people still think that women play sports as recreational or physical activities only, not professionally or competitively. There should be equal opportunities for female athletes to participate in competitive sports as well as to coach those competitive sports teams. More importantly, we need to educate people and change their perspectives towards female sports to view as same as male sports.
I recently watched a documentary on homophobia in women’s basketball at Penn State. The movie honed in on Coach Rene Portland and her “training rules”; a fluffy couple of words used to replace her no Lesbians allowed rule. After almost 2 decades, Rene’s “training rules” were finally brought to light when Jennifer Harris (a former Lady Lion) filed a federal lawsuit in 2006 against Rene and the University. Harris said she had been removed from the team because of her perceived sexuality; Rene thought Harris was a Lesbian. Before watching this documentary and reading your piece on negative recruiting I was naïve to the apparent problem of discrimination in women’s sports. You talked about safety, your experience with parents, and how some of them would ask what your players were like. When I read this I tried to understand the logic behind their fears. Were the parents afraid their child would be at a greater risk of falling victim to sexual assault, or were they afraid their child would be “turned into a Lesbian?” Both men and women can be victims of sexual assault. Yes, reports indicate that women have a higher risk than men for being sexually assaulted, but a significant figure of those sexual assaults were, or will be, carried out by men. It seems to me then that the parents were afraid their daughter would be “turned into a Lesbian.” Being a Lesbian is seen as having a disease. I’m appalled by this, and I wonder how schools can develop human sexuality classes, or add curriculum to other classes (including high school level, college, and on) that addresses this fear. In my opinion, homophobia is no different than racism or sexism. Negatively targeting a person’s identity and limiting their success because of their identity is discrimination. A woman from the documentary put it like this, how long would outward homophobia be accepted if the word Lesbian in the sentence “No Lesbians allowed” was replaced with another word such as “No blacks allowed” or “No Jews allowed”?
As a female collegiate athlete I have had numerous first-hand experiences with the lack of women in collegiate coach positions as well as most of the elite teams I have been on for the past 10-12 years. I have also seen and heard the negative stereotypes placed against the our women’s basketball team: one negative statement was from a “since retired” assistant coach of mine. These negative stereotypes against women in sport deeply bother me and can be witnessed among my cross country team. We try to be as feminine as possible (when in fact our bodies resemble those of adolescent boys more than the socially constructed ideals of a woman’s body) we wear the smallest spandex to practice, run in sports bras, match, have perfect ponytails, and wear makeup (all of this at 7am!). When a teammate doesn’t play this part they are ostracized, and ridiculed. I have a feeling that a lot of this can be attributed to the negative stereotypes placed upon women in elite sport positions. What are ways in which female athletes, themselves, can combat these negative stereotypes? And in turn do you think this would help in increasing the number of female coaches at elite level athletics?
Every course I have been enrolled into, this topic seems to have the biggest impact on me. Growing up engaged in physical activities, I have had only one female coach. Her assistant coach, who was a male, tried to always take over and coach our practices and games himself. Needless to say, I once had the dream to become an elementary or middle school basketball coach. Unfortunately, this passion of mine got thrown out of the window after I had the experience of an assistance coach. I felt as though that type of job did not “fit” me. It took me a while to figure out why it did not “fit” me and finally I came to the conclusion that I was always being looked down upon. Always being judged based upon how I looked and not upon my physical abilities make me feel uncomfortable and self cautious. Although I was only assisting younger children, I would get judged not by the children, but their parents. It seemed as though they did not want their child associated with an individual like “me”. Instead of coming up to me and asking questions about the class overall, they would approach the male head coach. I believe homophobia will always be an issue because not everyone will have an open mind-set, which can be due to their beliefs and/or society. It’s hard to fathom because I’m part of the percent that will always be judged and ridiculed for this reason. It makes me wonder if these individuals will ever get the same amount of respect and opportunities as everyone else. How long will this last? Why can’t it be based off of physical abilities and what is being taught/learned overall? Why can’t these individual’s see what it is like to be in the shoes of the individual who is being turned down for these reasons?
It is true that there is a lack of female coaches and leaders in sport. Men have been on the top of the coaching world for so long that even if a woman were to undertake the challenge of moving up in the ranks of professional athletics in terms of a major leadership roles she would face huge adversities. Being accepted by her male counterparts, for one thing, for even trying would be one of the biggest challenges. Whether people are open about it or not sexism still runs rampant in the opinions of many. I doubt that woman would be able to establish themselves very easily for this reason alone. The fact that more men than women reach higher levels of sports do influence the number of knowledgeable individuals that could coach a team. However, it is hard enough for our country to accept an African American president, accepting a woman in a role traditionally held by men would be equally as hard. I am interested to know the percent of men and women who support female coaches? And if there is a significant difference in support between both genders?
I remember in high school, I asked my dad, why is there a lack of female coaches in sport. As a female athlete, who was interested in the game of sport, and always felt that I could be a leader in my team, coaching seemed like an option of career choice. Yet, when I asked my dad, he responded “women tend to be too emotional towards the game, and men have always been on top, its not so often you see a women in a leading position, there’s very few…but there is no true reason why females wouldn’t be successful if they were to be in that top position.” The lack of female coaches and leaders in sport may be due to the risk and less margin of error that females have in a top position. Female coaches and leaders do not have the easy pathway to the top, and when they get there they don’t have the security that male coaches and leaders would receive right a way. It’s hard enough to want to be a female leader or coach, let alone be ready to face issues that could come, because a female at the top is not a “norm” of society, but HOW do we spread the awareness and possibilities that success and acceptance is something that everyone needs to work towards, both Universities, NCAA, society, and the male and female persons….