Explaining Male Dominance and Sex Segregation in Coaching: Three Approaches

Abstract

This article discusses various approaches that have been used to explain coaching as a male-dominated occupation. Individual approaches look at the interests, qualifications, and choices of women to explain their absence in male-dominated jobs. Structural approaches assume that gender-differentiated work behavior is more a function of location in organizational hierarchy than of gender. In the third approach, social relations, gender is seen as a verb in that women and men collectively struggle over the power to give meaning to social facts, including the meaning of coaching. This approach shows how structures, jobs, activities in those jobs, workers, and places of work are gendered through the meanings we assign to them. The ways those meanings may be altered if and when the number of women in coaching begins to increase are described.