27/04/2026
We talk a lot about what girls miss out on in sport. But what about the boys?
Every weekend at games and throughout the week at training, boys across Australia show up to sport and watch adults do their jobs. They watch who runs the session, who calls the drills, who makes the decisions , and whose authority goes unquestioned. Most of the time, without anyone intending it, the people they are watching are largely male.
That's not just a problem for women trying to build coaching careers. It's a problem for every boy taking part. Because children don't learn what power looks like from textbooks. They learn it from the people running the session. And diversity in coaching brings diversity in approach: different communication styles, different ways of building confidence, different models of what it means to be in charge.
They learn it from the people they look up to in all the everyday places and spaces those kids occupy their time: home, school, work (when they're old enough), and sport.
When those people are overwhelmingly male, boys quietly absorb a lesson nobody planned to teach them: that this is how it works, that authority has a gender, and that the natural order of sport looks a lot like the natural order of everything else.
This article is about that lesson. Not the one written in any policy document, but the one delivered silently, every week, through who is in charge and who is not.
The numbers tell the structural story. Women make up 36% of community-level coaches. By the time you reach Olympic-accredited coaching, that figure drops to 19%. In six seasons of AFLW, three women served as senior head coaches. Twenty-three men held the same role. The pipeline is not leaking. It is being compressed, at every level, by structures that were never designed with women in mind.
This matters for girls, obviously. But it also matters for boys, in ways the conversation rarely gets to.
· 36% Women among community-level coaches
· 19% Women among Olympic-accredited coaches
· 3 vs 23 Female vs male AFLW senior head coaches across 6 seasons
WHO'S IN CHARGE TELLS BOYS WHO BELONGS IN CHARGE
When aggression is the dominant mode of authority boys are exposed to, it becomes the template for what leadership looks like.
Sport is one of the primary places where boys learn what authority looks like. Not through lessons, but through observation. Who runs the training session. Who calls the plays. Who raises their voice and whose voice carries weight. When that person is almost always male, boys absorb a lesson about power that no classroom instruction will easily undo.
Sporting culture is often associated with a particular version of masculinity: dominant, aggressive, emotionally closed. The culture reproduces itself, not because of individual bad actors, but because when everyone in charge looks the same, nobody stops to ask whether there's a better way.
And there often is.
The assertive, high-intensity coaching style that drives some kids forward leaves others behind. Variety in who leads means variety in how kids are reached, and that is good for every child on the team, regardless of gender.
When women hold genuine coaching authority, that changes. Not through a speech about values, but through the daily reality of who is standing at the front and a different approach to the same job.
Boys who grow up with female coaches in positions of real authority develop a different mental model of what leadership looks like, simply by having lived experience of it as normal.
WHAT WOMEN BRING TO COACHING, AND WHY IT MATTERS
Female coach working with teen boys football team
Athletes rate communal coaching styles more highly for relational competence. That preference does not change based on the coach's gender.
Research on 308 athletes across sport levels and genders found that male and female coaches received equivalent competence ratings. Athletes did not systematically prefer male coaches. What they did consistently prefer was a communal coaching style: supportive, empathetic, collaborative. Coaches who led that way rated higher on both relational and strategic competence, regardless of gender.
The coaching style athletes most value is one more commonly modelled by women. And yet the structures of sport consistently penalise women who bring it. Women who coach assertively are read as aggressive. Women who coach collaboratively are read as insufficiently serious. The double bind is structural, built into environments designed around a version of authority that was never meant to include them.
Boys trained in these environments absorb both lessons: that leadership is male, and that care is weakness. Neither is true. Neither is useful. And both are preventable.
WHEN WOMEN DO BREAK THROUGH
Nancy Lieberman became the second woman to serve as an NBA assistant coach in 2015, and went on to become the first female coach to win a title in a men's professional league.
Nancy Lieberman joined the Sacramento Kings' staff in 2015, the second woman ever in an NBA assistant coaching role. She later became the first female coach to win a title in a men's professional league, taking the BIG3's Power team to the 2018 championship. Becky Hammon, who preceded her at the Spurs, left the NBA in 2021 to become head coach of the Las Vegas Aces, winning three WNBA championships in four seasons.
In the NFL, Jen Welter's 2015 Cardinals internship lasted five weeks, made history, and did not produce a permanent position. The door opened unevenly depending on how much genuine institutional backing existed behind it.
Closer to home, Janelle Pallister's story cuts to the same point. A Seoul 1988 Olympian and triple Commonwealth Games medallist, Janelle went on to become a high-performance swimming coach within the AIS ecosystem. And yet for years she described herself not as a coach but as someone who was "just helping out." That identity delay had nothing to do with her qualifications. It reflects a system that does not extend legitimacy to women in coaching roles without resistance.
Visiting coaches would automatically gravitate toward her male co-coach despite her equal experience. The expertise was there. The recognition was not. In environments where women were given real authority and treated as full members of coaching staff, they were effective. The novelty, as one of the first women on an NCAA Division I men's ice hockey staff put it, was entirely external. From the inside, it was just the job.
OKAY, BUT WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
👉🏻 Ask the question clubs don't want to answer
If you ask a club why there are so few female coaches, the most common answer is pipeline. Not enough women coming through. Which sounds reasonable until you look at the numbers: women enter coaching at 36% and exit the pathway at almost twice that rate by the time it reaches elite level.
The pipeline is full at the bottom. Something is happening in the middle.
The honest answer is culture. Clubs that give women a seat at the table but serve them from a menu they are not supposed to order from are not making progress. They are performing it. Token inclusion without structural change does not shift what boys observe, what norms get reinforced, or what kind of authority becomes normal to them.
The question worth asking is not whether there are enough women in the pipeline. It's why so many leave it.
IF YOU WANT TO COACH, COACH.
Female coach working with a mixed boys and girls sporting team
Women who coach are not helpers or hopefuls. They are coaches.
To any woman who's coaching: YOU ARE A COACH. Not a helper. Not an assistant building toward something. Not a wannabe waiting for permission. A coach, right now, with as much right to be at the front of that training session as anyone else who puts their hand up.
Identify as one. Pursue it with that frame. The initiatives exist: female coaching scholarships, executive leadership programs, sporting body development pathways. They are not charity. They are the structural correction that a lopsided system requires, and using them is not a shortcut. It is the point.
Know what you bring. The assertive, high-intensity approach that drives some athletes forward leaves others behind. The coach who focuses on day-to-day optimisation, on the individual athlete in front of them, on building intrinsic motivation rather than just compliance, is not doing a softer version of the job. They are doing a different and necessary part of it. Sport needs both. Right now it is only reliably getting one.
The culture shifts when the numbers shift. The numbers shift when women pursue coaching as the full and legitimate career it is, and when clubs stop mistaking performance for progress.
The sky genuinely is the limit for women with the attitude and aptitude to be the face of that change. Sport needs those women.
And so do the boys on the sideline, watching and learning what authority looks like.
