Speakers
Description
Issues related to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) are increasingly becoming strategic priorities for sport organisations across the world. More specifically, in recent years sport organisations have begun to adopt policies and initiatives that aim to increase the ethnic diversity of their sports and tackle inequities in access, experiences and outcomes among ethnically minoritised groups. Evidence suggests that while some progress has been made– particularly in terms of sport participation – in other non-playing roles such as sport coaching and governance, change has been harder to identify.
This presentation seeks to examine some of the reasons behind what might be considered the ‘policy failure’ of EDI in sport. Sport coaching offers an intriguing case for this task because of the persistent lack of ethnic diversity across the profession (both at elite and grassroots levels) and because it is the subject of one of the most high-profile EDI initiatives - the NFL’s Rooney Rule – that has informed broader EDI approaches both within and outside sport.
Drawing on evidence including data recently collected on football coaching positions across Europe, and with the aid of the growing body of critical sociological work investigating racialised inequities in sport coaching more broadly, we propose several structural, cultural and institutional reasons for the EDI ‘policy failure’ in sport The paper concludes by offering a number of recommendations for the design of future EDI initiatives that may prove more fruitful in addressing inequities and enabling positive representational and inclusionary outcomes in the area of sport coaching.
