Elite coaching, gender, and diversity

Sport coaching at the elite level continues to be a site for gender (and other) inequities. Elite sport contexts in particular often produce a rather narrow range of permissible identities and practices. Important lessons can be learned by understanding the experiences of women coaches who interact with these contexts. How do they obtain these coveted coaching positions? What unique gendered challenges do they face? In this chapter, we employ constructivist and poststructuralist approaches to understand and advance women coaching in elite sport. The constructivist approach highlights psychosocial perspectives to inform its analysis. The poststructural approach highlights sociocultural and postfeminist perspectives to critically interrogate women coaches’ lived experience situated within elite sport coaching and strength and conditioning coaching cultures. Sport leaders will benefit from this chapter’s variety of evidentiary sources to glean transferable tools for enhancing equity and leading multi-level initiatives to enhance gender diversity in elite coaching.