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Where are the female coaches?

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Over half the NZ Olympic team are women – but where are the female coaches?

For the first time the New Zealand Olympic team has more female than male athletes – yet less than 10 per cent of the coaches in Rio are women.

Massey University’s Professor Sarah Leberman, who researches ways to get more women into leadership roles in sport, including through coaching, says the number of New Zealand female Olympic coaches has not changed over the past decade.

“High Performance Sport NZ has a performance-driven, athlete-focused but coach-led system. The system is obviously working well for female athletes but, in terms of providing leadership opportunities through coaching, it’s not working for women.”

Professor Leberman says New Zealand is competing in 20 sports in Rio, and while exact figures are difficult to find, it appears only two of the 20 sports have female coaches – judo and gymnastics, and one of the gymnastics coaches is based in the United States.

“Everyone knows the Olympics is the pinnacle of sporting achievement for many athletes, but we shouldn’t forget it is also the pinnacle event for those who facilitate athlete achievement. Unfortunately for women, high participation levels aren’t being translated into leadership roles in sport – and you see this same pattern reflected in other sectors, including business and the education sector.”

Professor Leberman has analysed the coaching make up of the New Zealand Olympic team and the numbers are low when it comes to female coaches. She says many of the sports that have large female participation levels – football, hockey, rowing, rugby sevens – have all-male coaching teams.

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She believes part of the problem is the “gendered sport coaching environment”, which makes it difficult for women to come through.

“Apart from sports like netball, it’s genrally a male-dominated culture so that is less attractive to women and there are also few role models to inspire women. If you are an athlete and you never see a woman as your coach, you don’t think ‘my next step is coaching’.

“There are also many participants in sport who will never represent their country as an athlete, but they could, maybe, be a really good coach. I don’t know of any national or sport-specific strategies that currently encourage women to pursue this alternative pathway to the Olympics.”

Professor Leberman says creating visibility, role models and pathways for female coaches will help to redress the situation.

“We need to look out for talented women coaches, develop strategies to retain and support them and make them more visible so they can become role models. We also need a proactive national programme that explicitly encourages women into coaching and raises awareness.

“Only five women have been selected for High Performance Sport’s Coach Accelerator Programme over the past three years – three from netball. National Sport Organisations need to start bringing through women as coaches and making this a priority, as British Cycling did post London 2012 increasing their female coaches by 70% in three years.

While she is relunctant to talk about hard and fast quotas, Professor Leberman believes sports that have large numbers of female participants should at least have one assistant coach who is a women, starting at the local junior representative level.

“That would provide an opportunity for women to step up so we can develop a talent pool going forward. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008 we only had three female coaches; now in 2016 we still only have three female coaches so nothing is changing”.

“And it’s not just sport that is losing out. Ernst & Young and ESPN-W recently published research that shows many successful women in leadership positions within business and politics have sport in their background. The value of sport is clear– it develops transferable skills that are highly valued beyond the field of play.”

ENDS

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