Alienation, othering and reconstituting: An alternative future for women’s coach education

The purpose of this paper is to critique current women-only coach education initiatives, before suggesting an alternative approach to dealing with gender discrimination in coaching provision. Having increased in popularity over recent years primarily through justifications as being ‘safe spaces’ for participants, such initiatives have nevertheless become contested terrain. The challenge emanates from their perception as a ‘fix the women’ narrative, or as a form of ‘defensive othering’. From either standpoint the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary narrative is sustained. Alternatively, whilst seeing some value in the initial ‘safe space’ position, we posit such programmes not as ends in themselves but as means to integrated ends. In addition, we argue that their substance should be focussed not so much on duplicating mainstream content (e.g., particular coaching pedagogies), but on developing a critical sociological consciousness, including both a deconstruction and reconstruction of (minority) coaching selves. Such a consciousness comprises (1) a judicious awareness of influencing social structures and why things are as they are, and (2) a recourse to micropolitical agency in terms of a stance-related identity to develop a more secure coaching self. In doing so, it is claimed that our coaching identities should lie ahead of us within a larger quest of altering the current culture.