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Sporting opportunities for females continue to grow, which include what are seen as masculine sports, such as football, rugby and cricket. This is, in part, due to the increased widespread media coverage of women’s sports, such as the 2019 Women’s Football World Cup. The Women’s Rugby World Cup, which was due to be held in New Zealand in 2021, has been rescheduled due to Covid-19 to 2022, will be known as the ‘Rugby World Cup’, removing the gender differentiation between the men’s and the women’s game . Within tennis, initiatives such as the ‘She Rallies’ scheme developed by the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), along with Judy Murray, aim to encourage more girls and women into playing and coaching tennis. Campaigns led by charities such as ‘Women in Sport’, first developed in 1984, and the WTCA (Women’s Tennis Coaching Association), founded in 2015, are making an increasing impact globally, with an overall goal to provide equal opportunities for women in the sporting world.
Despite this, sports remain gendered and stereotypical with greater participation for females in traditional female sports such as gymnastics and dance, whereas for those participating in sports such as rugby or football are likely to be labelled as ‘masculine’ or as ‘lesbians’. This gendered division is even more apparent when looking at coaching in sport and the focus of research looked at one sport in particular, tennis, where female tennis coaches are still vastly under-represented with the majority of coaches being male. Research explored the barriers, inequalities and discrimination that female tennis coaches experience.
