Good morning, everybody.
Thank you very much for inviting us to present on this topic, which is of course very important to us.
As a bit about my background, I was an athlete. I was on the Canadian National Ski Team many years ago, and then went on to be a coach at all levels, including at the national and Olympic level for Canada and then for New Zealand. I have about 20 years of experience. It was hard to keep a career as a high-performance Alpine ski coach and also have a family, so I decided to go back to university. I didn't think I was going to be there for 10 years, but I ended up in my position as an associate professor with a specialization in coach development.
You have a lot of stats, and so. I'm not going to speak very much to the stats because I think some of the other witnesses will. I am going to focus on women in coaching and particularly the theory that I have been working with for the last 15 years, which is social learning theory, that has to do with learning in safe social spaces, and I'll explain a little bit about what that is.
I'm going to talk to you about how we have some evidence that this is a useful approach to supporting women in coaching. I will also present some of the solutions we feel could easily be implemented.
Why is this important? It's because retention and recruitment are important for women coaches. You'll see that there is a low percentage of women coaches. Women have different ways of knowing, they work more collaboratively, and they have different communication styles. They have something different to contribute to the athletes and to the world of sport.
Also, if we have more women role models in coaching, then that means we can encourage more women and girls to get into both the sport and into leadership roles.
If we have mothers coaching more, particularly at the community level, that will encourage more girls to participate, which is also a problem.
Finally, if our female elite athletes, in whom we have invested so much, wish to go into coaching, then we would be able to support them to stay there.
I will give you some definitions related to social learning spaces. What is a social learning space? It can be anything from a one-on-one conversation to a group of people who are all working around the same practice. It can include your networks, conferences, workshops, etc.
I have some evidence from a recent study we did. We looked all over North America. We didn't find any examples of what we considered to be communities of practice in Canada in coaching, but we found in the NCAA, the American collegiate association, something that they call “loop groups”, which met the definition of communities of practice.
In the handout, you can see some of the quotations from this qualitative study exploring what this did for these women to participate in this supportive group, which met about once a month. It included all people coaching women in their respective universities. There actually was one man involved, but it was mostly women, and there were all different sports.
The first one talks about knowing that you're not alone and having a safe zone to realize that you have support if you want it whereas normally you'd just be working away in your office and with your athletes.
The other one is very important because the woman says she had thought about starting a family in the next few years, but thought that would be the end of her coaching career. Being in this group showed her that she could in fact be both a mother and a successful coach. Now she's not worried about that.
The last one is from a very experienced coach who was really surprised. She didn't realize how much support younger newer coaches coming in needed. She thought that it would come from personnel. In fact, these kinds of groups allow you to have some support from outside where you won't be judged and where it won't be thought that you're not able to do your job because you need advice on facing certain challenges.
Women coaches lack a network. This comes out of our meeting in Quebec City, Conversation 2015, which Dr. Demers organized.
What can we do to help this?
We can use communities of practice as a form of continuing development, which is required to remain certified as a coach. We have some examples already. There's one going on right now with wheelchair curling, which is not specifically with women coaches. We've also done one with Special Olympics. We can also leverage the existing Canada Games apprenticeship program and move that online. These are low-cost solutions. We just use existing platforms that we have. We can use these social learning spaces to spread great stories about women leadership in sport and help elite female athletes who want to go into coaching.
A second problem is to increase the number of coaches, which you'll probably hear about later on. Similarly, we need to support these female athletes when they want to go into coaching. We need to offer all-woman coaching clinics. We also need to offer clinics to the men who are in the coaching world about coaching women and about working with women coaches.
The third issue would be around making it a viable career for women. This speaks to that quotation of the woman in the NCAA study who thought she could not be a coach and a mother at the same time.