What’s Going On Behind The Great Sports-Coaching Double-Standard?

Although the FIFA Women’s World Cup now trails in recent, sporting memory behind the drama of Wimbledon and the men’s Cricket World Cup, it’s impossible to overstate the grip that the French-held tournament had on the public imagination in the UK.

If one considers that the average turnstile count for a UK Women’s Super League football fixture is only 1,000, the fact that 11.7 million viewers tuned in to watch the semi-final between England and the US says so much about how the World Cup boosted the profile of the women’s game.

But in all the various post-mortems, commentaries and analyses I watched and listened to, there was one question I found particularly difficult to grapple with.

In one interview, the England side’s coach Phil Neville was asked whether what his team really needed was a female coach. Surely, the interviewer said, until that happened, the women’s game would not have achieved true equality.

Neville attempted to parry the question, saying that, if you had that rule, it would mean that only men could coach male teams – for, in effect, you would be saying that there had to be strict gender alignment with the players.

Now, this may seem on the surface like a shrewd way for Neville to defuse a point that was deliberately designed to wrong-foot him. But I’m wondering whether there was rather more to his response than there first appeared to be.

Indeed, if you look at it from another angle, it would seem to perpetuate an exclusionary attitude towards women; to hold them to a different standard within the coaching profession – or even set in stone a barrier to entry for women who may aspire to coach. Because of course, so many men coach female teams – and women coaching male teams is extremely rare.

In fact, when it does happen, it causes a stir. At the end of last year, there was some media excitement when UK football club Arlesey Town recruited as coach Natasha Orchard-Smith: a former coach of youth players at Premier League giants Arsenal.

Orchard-Smith’s appointment instantly made her the highest-ranked female coach in the men’s game – and yet Arlesey Town is in the ninth tier of English football: unlikely to play against her old club anytime soon.

Then there’s the temperament issue. On 4 June, The Conversation featured some research from social scientists who were repeating what we hear so often: that behavior routinely described as abusive, demeaning and manipulative in female coaches could well be called tough, demanding and passionate when emerging from their male counterparts.

Lest we forget, in 2017, Illinois Women’s Basketball coach Matt Bollant was fired for creating a racially abusive environment in his camp – yet he was soon hired again, at a similar level of seniority, by Eastern Illinois University, his missteps apparently forgotten.

Under Title IX of the 1972 US Education Amendments Act, gender discrimination in any education program receiving Federal financial assistance is banned.

Yet in June, an annual report on college sports from The Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sport noted that, while overall female representation in the field has continued to improve, that was “negatively balanced by the fact that, in the 47th year after the passage of Title IX, nearly 60% of all women’s teams are still coached by men and 51% of all the assistant coaches on women’s teams are men.”

Given the terrific job that Jill Ellis did of coaching the US team at the Women’s World Cup, these figures seem so outdated.

Getting the best from people is not determined by gender. If we turn to notions of good coaching in a business context, there are no associations with behavior that is abusive, demeaning and manipulative.

Coaching is about guiding and helping people to achieve their full potential – often starting from the premise that people know what to do in order to succeed. They just need someone on their side who encourages and believes in them – whether male, or female.

Source: Forbes.com

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