There has been progress; the leaps forward that female athletes have experienced in terms of recognition, media coverage and respect has been significant over the past few years.
Women being good athletes and being deserving of recognition is becoming, whisper it, normal. In contrast, though, the progress made when it comes to representation of female coaches has been negligible, if there at all.
The coaching world is well and truly dominated by men.
Yes, there’s pockets in which female coaches are more commonplace - invariably it’s within women’s sport - but on the whole, coaching remains a man’s game.
The need for more female coaches was brought into the spotlight this week with the launch of Judy Murray’s ‘Learn to Lead’ initiative, which aims to “equip and empower young girls to become Scotland’s next generation of sporting leaders”.
Murray’s goal is not only to encourage more females into coaching - she ultimately wants to see more women in non-athlete roles across the board including fitness trainers, physios, management and in the boardroom - and she’s right in the assertion that women are outnumbered in pretty much every area of sport, but it’s within the coaching sphere that the disparity between male coaches and female coaches is so clearly apparent.
Murray knows what it feels like to exist in a male-dominated world; for the entirety of her coaching career, she was either the lone women in the room, or was one of only a tiny group of women in a sea full of men.
The picture at grassroots level is not much better than in elite sport. Across grassroots sport, male coaches, again, dominate the landscape.
Indeed, research released earlier this year which was conducted by YouGov on behalf of UK Sport reported that only 38 percent of sports coaches are female and perhaps most worryingly, this is a 6 percent drop from two years ago.
There’s a number of reasons why having female coaches is not just important, but vital.
Firstly, there’s the ‘if you can’t see it, you can’t be it’ argument. The presence of female coaches shows young girls that coaching is a viable path for them to choose.
We’ve seen the benefits of young girls starting to realise that it is entirely feasible to dream about becoming an elite athlete - the increased profile of women’s sport has made becoming a professional athlete a legitimate career goal for young girls - but the dearth of female coaches means that, all too often, becoming a coach just doesn’t seem like a realistic aim for many young girls and women.
Secondly, female coaches often bring an entirely different approach to their work in comparison to their male counterparts.
Women have a different manner, a different way of tackling challenges and issues, a different way of communicating and, perhaps most importantly, a different (and better) understanding of female athletes.
Female athletes are not, in so many ways, the same as male athletes. Yet for male coaches, it is, understandably, extremely hard for them to tweak their approach accordingly because, to put it simply, they often just don’t get it. To a lot of male coaches, an athlete is an athlete but female coaches have a greater understanding of how female athletes may need to be treated not more gently, but differently to male athletes.
Any progress with the representation of female coaches, particularly at elite level which is the most visible, must be celebrated. The Scotland women’s football team had two high-profile and successful women at the helm in the shape of Anna Signeul between 2005 and 2017 and Shelly Kerr between 2017 and 2020. Male coaches then took over until, encouragingly, a female returned to the helm in the shape of Australian national, Melissa Andreatta, whose first game in charge was just over a week ago.
There’s a similar picture in women’s club football too, in which there’s a number of female coaches, but plenty of men as well.
Individual sport, for some reason, seems to fare even worse when it comes to female coaches at elite level.
In Murray’s sport of tennis, female coaches are an astonishingly rare sight, particularly in the men’s game but they’re remarkably uncommon in women’s tennis too, and this is mirrored across many other individual sports.
There’s a number of reasons for this.
Elite sport is not a working-from-home job. Working with an elite athlete means you have to go where they go and in the case of most athletes, that means trekking the globe for over half the year. In the case of tennis, it means globetrotting for eleven months of the year. For many women, particularly if they have children, this is just not a workable or an attractive proposition. In contrast, it’s far more common, and far more accepted, for men to leave their family at home for months at time while they travel the world as an elite-level coach.
And there’s the ingrained gender-bias or, in the worst cases, misogyny, which means women remain undervalued and underestimated as coaches.
The decades-long dominance of men in the coaching sphere has resulted in women’s potential value being totally underestimated, with the assumption being commonplace that men just make better coaches. This is absolutely and definitively not true, but it remains a pervading belief throughout many areas of sport.
I’m optimistic that the number of female coaches both at grassroots and at elite level can improve. The progress made by women's sport in recent years is surely an indicator of what can be done. But progress won’t happen overnight, nor will it happen without a concerted effort to change things.
Murray’s programme will, I hope, bear some fruit within Scotland because it’s not only female athletes who would benefit from more female coaches, it’s sport as a whole.
AND ANOTHER THING…
The news that Scotland women’s rugby team will play at Murrayfield for their Six Nations match against England next year is thrilling news.
The Scotland women’s team has made impressive progress in recent seasons and playing at Murrayfield, where they’re expected to attract a record-breaking crowd, is deserved reward.
This is a significant step forward for women’s rugby in Scotland, and now it’s in the players hands to make the most of it with a good perforce against England next April.
