The Case For Women Coaches: The Women Sports Academy

Within Australian sport research, there is a lack of information about women in elite coaching roles. This highlights the need for discussion and further studies that break down the disparity between male and female coaches and why this exists in the industry.

In the Australian team of accredited coaches at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, only 9% of these were women. The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games only saw a slight increase in these numbers with 13% of the coaching team being females. Evidently, a significant lack of female representation in high level coaching positions still exists.

There is extensive data that shows how in general women are still grossly underrepresented in sports:

40% of all sports participants are female, yet women’s sports receive only 4% of all sport media coverage and female athletes are much more likely than male athletes to be portrayed in sexually provocative poses.

47% of all athletes in the Tokyo Olympics were women, but only 13% of the coaching staff were, and only 30.5% of the technical officials were women. The 2021 Australian Olympic team saw 254 women (53%) out of 482 athletes. However only less than 10% of the coaches in the Australian Olympic team were women.

In Australia soccer, there are 2,934 accredited coaches and just 137 (4.66%) of them are women. It is also interesting to note that in all Australia female sports, excluding netball, only 25% of the coaching roles are filled by female coaches.

Only 30.8% of key management personnel were women in Australian Sporting Organisations (down from 38.2% the previous year), while that figure was 33.8% for women in high performance roles.

In 2020, out of the 89% of adults [over 15 years] that participated in sport/PA, only 31% were women vs 69% of men.