Sports Science and International Day of Women and Girls in Science
Today, 11th February,
is International Day of Women and Girls in Science but Sports Science is not
included in the statistics to show the lack of women’s inclusion in this field.
For more details about this day, see:
It’s a two pronged problem in
Sports Science. Firstly, women aren’t being researched so that means we have
less information on, for instance, injury prevention and recovery in relation
to women. Secondly, not many women study the subject and even when they do and
become researchers they fall into the trap of researching men rather than
women, perhaps in the hope that this will be popular with men and so give them
an opportunity to be published in a prestigious Sports Science journal. Given
that men are biased towards researching men themselves, this means that there’s
even less research on female athletes which could be adversely affecting their
success, progress and performance in sport. It’s an issue that needs addressing
because it skews results in favour of men. This sample bias undermines the
validity of many results published in peer-reviewed journals. All this is supported
by and summed up well in this article which emphasises the need for inclusion
so that studies reflect the broad spectrum of all who participate in sport
regardless of gender, age, race, or health, and is available at:
As this article shows:
“The lack of parity for female research participants “should be alarming,”
Hawley says. He notes that while scientists bear some responsibility, “the
funding bodies and editors of journals should be asking more serious
questions.” Scientists who peer-review each other’s work should also ask hard
questions, he says. “Peer review is failing as well….The typical responses
[are] ‘unfortunately the budget does not permit females’ (a complete white lie
of course), and time and practicalities. It’s not an excuse.””
This trend is also seen at
managerial levels in sport and coaching. For instance, women tennis players are
predominantly coached by men. Why? It makes little sense. A woman coach will
better understand and appreciate the needs of a female athlete usually because
she has been one herself or attempted to be one! So I was delighted to see that
Muguruza is back with her previous amazing coach, Conchita Martinez who was
instrumental in Muguruza winning The Championships at Wimbledon in 2017! Martinez
was also captain of both The Spanish Fed Cup team (women) and The Spanish Davis
Cup team (men) and considerably improved Spanish tennis for both sexes. She was
genius in both. I think she’s the first woman to achieve this, as far as I am
aware! There was an outcry when she was ousted from both positions despite her
enormous success. Understandably, Conchita was livid as were all of us! Here’s
an article on this:
http://www.tennis.com/pro-game/2017/09/martinez-fired-from-spains-fed-cup-and-davis-cup-teams/69415/
As ukcoaching.org points out, it
is important that women have a choice in who coaches them and so do not have to
have a male coach by default. I think this also helps girls/women with their
self-esteem and gives them a role-model which in turn gives them the ability to
imagine themselves as women athletes.
“Currently there are more men
coaching than women and we think that everyone doing sport should have the
choice as to who coaches or leads their activity.
Sports Coach UK has
highlighted that women only account for around 30% of coaching workforce, this
proportion drops to 17% of qualified coaches and only 12% of highly qualified
coaches. Between 2014 and 2016, Sports Coach UK was actively involved in
an EU funded project (SCORE) to promote gender equality in coaching.”
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