Rider:
Most coaches are men, most team moms are ... moms
A recent study in the journal Gender and Society
confirms what many sports mothers have long known: the gender divide in
youth sports is no different than in the home and the workplace, with
the vast majority of head coaching slots held by men, and nearly all of
the team mom positions held by, well, moms.
Researchers
at the University of Southern California studied yearbooks for 538
Little League baseball and softball teams and 1,490 American Youth
Soccer Organization (AYSO) soccer teams over an eight-year period.
Their findings: only 13.4% of the head coaches in AYSO soccer were
women, and only 5.9 % of the head coaching slots in baseball and
softball went to women. Of those women who were head coaches, most
coached younger kids (ages 5 to 8) and girls. Boys - and especially
boys older than age 10 - almost never had women coaches.
The
low numbers of women coaches at the youth level exist despite factors
that would otherwise have suggested a greater number, including the
greatly expanded opportunities for girls in sports, the fact that most
of today's women came of age in a post-Title IX world in which many of
them played sports, and that women vastly outnumber men in every other
volunteer activity involving their kids (PTA, Scouts, special events at
school etc.).
The natural order of things?
What, then, explains this persistent gender segregation?
According
to the authors, it is simply the "natural extension of gendered
divisions of labor in families and workplaces, ... not simply from an
accumulation of individual choices; rather, [but] produced ... and
shaped by gendered language and belief systems [that] are seen by many
coaches as natural extensions of gendered divisions of labor in
families and workplaces."
In
other words, because men still hold leadership positions in both their
families and work, with women still generally performing supporting
roles in each, this same gendered division ends up being the norm in
youth sports as well and is the natural order of things.
In particular, the authors see the gendered division of labor in youth sports as resulting from the following:
- Entry into the coaching pipeline is reserved for men.
Most head coaches interviewed had first served as assistant coaches for
between one and six years. When requests went out for volunteers,
either in a letter or e-mail to parents or at the pre-season meeting,
the authors found in nearly all instances that dads "volunteered" to
help as assistant coaches and moms "volunteered" to be team parents.
Women aren't invited to be coaches and, once they become coaches, don't
find it to be friendly territory.
- Coaches
commonly assume that fathers will volunteer to be assistant coaches and
mothers to be "team moms" and recruit accordingly. None of the head
coaches interviewed currently had a man as a team parent. Many of them,
including a woman soccer coach, "laughed at the very thought." One
remarked, "Oh, it's always a mom [laughs]. ‘Team mom.' That's why it's
called ‘team mom'. You know, the coach is a male. And the mom - I mean,
that's housekeeping - you know: Assign the snack."
- Youth sports use gendered language drawn from family relations. Team
coaches aren't referred to as a team's "dad" but team parents are
consistently referred to as the "team mom." "This gendered language
supports the notion that a team is structured very much like a
‘traditional' heterosexual family: The head coach - nearly always a man
- is the leader and the public face of the team; the team parent -
nearly always a woman - is working behind the scenes, doing support
work; assistant coaches - mostly men, but including the occasional
woman - help the coach on the field during practices and games."
- Men don't or won't consider doing team parent work.
Many of the woman coaches interviewed recognized that the reason men
were not team parents was because they perceived it as "women's work",
as non-masculine and thus undesirable, and that to publicly take on a
job defined as "feminine" would be embarrassing or even humiliating.
One woman Little League coach found it ironic that her husband - who
did most of the cooking and housework at home - would not take on the
role of team parent for his daughter's team. "I think there's a lot of
men out there, but they don't want to be perceived as being
domesticated." The resistance of men to even consider taking on the
team parent position ultimately leaves the job in the hands of a woman
who might also have been reluctant to do it. These informal constraints
channel many women away from coaching and toward being team parents.
Thus women don't so much as "volunteer" to be team parents as they are coerced by the system into taking on the job.
Valuing women
The study's authors point out a number of adverse effects of the current gender segregation in youth sports:
- Women's work is devalued.
The important work done by team parents is often disparaged by coaches
as trivial and unimportant, with coaches saying that it is "not very
hard to do" or "an easy job." There is a general failure on the part of
coaches to recognize that the job that women team parents do is often
just one of many volunteer jobs they perform in the community, while,
for most male coaches, it is usually their one and only volunteer
activity;
- It reinforces negative role-modeling and lack of respect for women.
Some of the women coaches interviewed who had consciously resisted the
gendered sorting system expressed concern that the "team mom" amounted
to negative role-modeling for kids and fed into the disrespect that
woman coaches experienced. One put it this way: "The kids think that
the moms should just be ‘team moms.' Which means that they don't take
the mothers seriously, and I think that is a bad thing. I mean it's a bad thing. I think that's a lack of respect to women, to mothers."
- It initiates children into a gender-segregated world.
Sports are framed as a "realm in which girls are empowered to exercise
individual choice (rehearsing choices they will later face in
straddling the demands of careers and family labor), while continuing
to view boys as naturally ‘hard-wired' to play sports (and ultimately,
to have public careers).... In short, [youth sports] initiates kids
into an adult world that has been only partially transformed by
feminism, where many of the burdens of bridging and balancing work and
family strains are still primarily on women's shoulders. Men coaches
and ‘team moms' symbolize and exemplify these tensions."
Changing the system
The
study offers little in the way of suggestions on how to change the
gender segregation in youths sports - although it includes a few
examples of women who simply refused to "go with the flow" of the
channeling process, either by challenging the gendered selection
process of assistant coaches and team parents or by refusing to have a
team parent at all - which only ended up creating extra work for women coaches (as if they didn't have enough already) that most men coaches delegated to a team mom.
Instead of "‘bad guys' engaged in overt acts of sexism and discrimination," the authors blame the system itself and
the unconscious, informal practicing of gender by "well-intentioned,
good people." They conclude that "any attempt to move toward greater
equality for women and men in youth sports presupposes simultaneous
movements toward equality in workplaces and families."
Brooke de lench is the author of Home Team Advantage: The Critical Role of Mothers In Youth Sports and founder and Editor-in-Chief of MomsTeam.com.
* * *
Brooke de Lench writes: For a more in-depth discussion of the important issues raised by this study, I highly recommend the 2009 book by one the study's co-authors, Professor Michael Messner, It's All for the Kids: Gender, Families and Youth Sports.
I had
the privilege of reading the book in manuscript form in the summer of
2008 and found it to contain a brilliant assessment of today's
gender-divided youth sports culture with many important insights that I
am sure will make it a "must read" for anyone involved in youth
sports.
I have
also listed below some articles on the MomsTeam.com site about women as
youth sports coaches and ways women and mothers can change the culture
so that it reflects their views as well as those of men.
Finally,
we want to hear from you. While I enjoyed coaching, I also enjoyed
being a team mom. What do you think of the study? Have you experienced
the gender division of labor the study talks about in your town? What
is your community doing to promote full inclusion of women at all
levels of coaching? Have you seen an increase in the number of women
coaches? Do you know of dads who have been or currently team parents?
Your voice matters. Click here to share your thoughts.
Teaser title:
Coaches are Mostly Men, Team Parents Are Always Women, Study Confirms
Teaser text:
A new study
confirms what many sports parents have long known: the gender divide
in
youth sports is no different than in the home and the workplace: the
vast majority of head coaching slots are men, and nearly all of
the team mom positions are held by women, many reluctantly.