ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the occupational landscape of women sport coaches, including three major areas of the gender divide: opportunity, pay inequality, and barriers and supports. To better understand the workplace experiences of women coaches, it discusses the lack of opportunity for women in the coaching profession. Since N. M. LaVoi’s seminal book on women in coaching, a handful of new studies have advanced knowledge pertaining to barriers and supports for women in coaching, including recruitment, hiring, and retention practices. Student athletes are remarkably under-examined in the coaching literature – despite holding ‘perhaps the most promise to increase women’s representation in leadership positions across all levels of sport’. Opportunities to improve the experiences of women coaches abound at every ‘level’, from the individual to the sociocultural. The chapter suggests that some actions can be taken at each level of the ecological model – but it is by no means comprehensive.
