Memo #6 Research proposal

Research Proposal Template

She can score

A critical analysis of gender inequality awareness in collegiate and youth soccer coaches.

By Nadima Skeff, MS

Purpose

This study seeks to explore the the awareness, influence, and importance that soccer coaches gives to gender inequality issues in youth female soccer. I will analyze coaches’ beliefs on social construction of gender and their ability to provide a practice that embraces gender equality. This project could help collegiate and youth soccer coaches understanding the importance of their coaching instructions and philosophy on how girls are empowered through the sport and how they can battle social gender stereotypes. I will be conducting a sociological study on gender stereotypes barrier in sports.

Questions

My goals as educator and soccer coach are to create awareness of gender inequality in soccer, and help soccer coaches to fight and provide support for girls to battle social construction of gender. Also, my goal is to motivate and support young female soccer players to be and act in a way that would benefit her performance with her full expression without the concern of gender stereotyping

The following research questions shape the research.

How can youth soccer coaches help athletes to battle social constructions of gender?

What should youth coaches do to embrace gender equality with their athletes?

How can youth soccer coaches provide a gender neutral instructional practice?

Do youth soccer coaches understand the importance of their coaching instructions on her their players see themselves?

Conceptual Foundation

I have been coaching soccer since the moment I stopped playing it 5 years ago. Like any other sport, soccer has all these different perspectives when comes to successful performance. For years I focused only in the technical, tactical, and physical part of the game. During Nutrition school and Kinesiology Masters degree, I shifted my focus to the physiology and biomechanical part of the game. This past year, while pursuing Master degree in Education, I started looking coaching as tool to educate coaches and players about social justice and appreciation for the game and what the game can provide for youth.  Just like any other social issue, I felt that if educators, coaches, and players fail to questions the dynamics of misogyny and male privilege, it will perpetuate discrimination and inequality.

While coaching I had a tough game where my team played very nice soccer but struggled in certain aspects, one of the parents told me “I wish my daughter would talk more during the game”. Then he added “but soccer is everything she enjoys and she is extremely scared of making the girls upset. She is afraid  of losing friends so she won’t talk during the games”. It was not the first time I heard a parent making this comment about their daughter, or neither the first time I felt the same way watching girls soccer. That comment is like common sense within youth sports. Girls are usually known as “social butterflies”. Consequently my comment back to that parents was:  “Welcome to girls soccer, it is what it is”.

After I said that, I thought about everything we had read, listened, talked, and learned. It made me question my attitude as a coach and a leader for these girls. Should I accept that? I looked at myself and I know for a fact I did not have that problem growing up playing with boys. I talked a lot when I played, and again, did that made me less girl or less women? Was that a problem? Did I miss the right femininity? Everyday I came to realized that no, I did not and I am not. Neither I want my players to be. I decided to question the dynamic imposed and supported by coaches, males, and society.

One time I heard in a podcast this someone saying: “We have a power and responsibility to reject what has been imposed” I couldn't agree more. My coaching philosophy has changed in the last couple of years, especially after scrubbing my assumptions about girls not talking. When I watch my girls play and I see limitations and mistakes in their performance, I ask myself: Would I be okay if a boy player acted this way? Would I ask more from a boy? Would I expect more? Is that a gender, personally, or biological limitation? In asking these questions, I am being careful to understand the assumptions that I have, and the reality I construct with my girls on the team. Does my coaching motivate and support a girl to be and act in a way that would benefit her performance with her full expression? How can youth soccer coaches help athletes to battle social constructions of gender?

Scholarship

There are many sources that have influence my approach to this topic and my decision to do this project.

In 2014, Hakan Larsson emphasized the difficulties of a gender-equality policy. In his article, he talked about how Sweden was determined on making sports a gender-equality space but when it came to practice it might turn out to rely on gender stereotypes and heteronormativity. My favorite quote of this article was from research mentioning sex differences, “ The research indicates that the ideas, within the sport as in society broadly speaking, about sex differences is clearly linked to heteronormativity in the sense that what is seen to be ‘naturally’ female (being socially-oriented and reliant on a coach) and ‘male’ (being competitive and confident) is also to be a heterosexual-and to be otherwise is to be homosexual” (Larsson, H. 2014). In the end of these articles Larsson challenge the teacher/coach/educator, saying that a critical approach to the sex/gender question should be accompanied by a critical approach t0 how competitive sport is performed and what is demands of individual. Larsson quote questions such as: how does my way to teach challenge stereotypes? How does it reinforce them? What does it leaves unchallenged? Does it raise critical questions? Whom does it leave invisible? Whom does it call on to contest my own privileges? These question are very similar to the ones I am trying to highlight in this study.

Couple other studies had an huge influence on how I see coaching. Iris M. Young, wrote in of the chapters of her book about the concept of feminine and/or feminine essence being something fragile gives the reader a new perspective of why girls acting certain way comparing to the boys. Going beyond the general ideas accepted for the society focusing in the feminine essence that limites girls and women to use theiri bodies in full capacity, ability, motion, and strength with confidence. She talked about how women in our society comport and act differently than men because the expectations and fears, showing that the feminine body perhaps “frequently or typically conducts itself in such comportment or movement” particularly from the structure and environment of feminine existence (Young, I.M. 1990).  Similar to Young work, Doyle talks about gender stereotype and the idea of masculinity and femininity. However, in this study the author emphasizes that perhaps gender are not opposite but orthogonal and independent variables, which gives the idea of the human being characteristic of being without the pressure of each side receives (Doyle, J. 2013).

The last article, and problem the one that brought so much of my past into this project is the article from Jorge Knijnik, where he talked about the struggle female Brazilian soccer players go through to be able to play the sport. He historically reminds that there was a point between 1941 to 1979 women were not allowed to practice football in parks, schools and stadia. Only in 1983 more teams started to be organized around the country, but prejudice was (and still is) very strong when comes to girls playing soccer in Brazil. There is no place to go. If the girls were masculine people would call them lesbian and ugly. Then girls would feel the necessity and compulsion to show some femininity to be accepted. Manipulating not only the society but also the girls in the sport believing in the strict code of consumer culture and the fake importance of being a “real woman” with “feminine essence”. Similar to present research, Knijnik mentioned how society and social contractions of gender influence the girl's life, and how they see themselves and see other in the sport. How they constantly fight to be accepted to a point that they believe they should look in certain way to avoid any type of prejudice towards the compulsory heterosexual mentality (Knijnik, J. 2014). .

Possible Data Collection

Through a series of interviews with collegiate and youth soccer coaches, I plan to analysis their responses and link to my personal coaching experience and the reality I see coaching youth girls. I will discuss strategies to overcome or minimize social construction of gender, and strategies to create gender equality awareness and its importance on girls performance. I am hoping to create a platform where coaches, players and parents can discuss about this issues. Also, I am hoping to create survey to players about their experience after intervention.

References (APA style)

Doyle, J. (2013). Dirt off her shoulders, 419-433.

Knijnik, J. D. (2014). Gendered barriers to Brazilian female football: twentieth-century legacies. Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality, 121-128.

Larsson, H. (2014). Can Gender Equality Become an Encumbrance?: The case of sport in the Nordic countries.

Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory.