At Temple University, professors Elizabeth Taylor and Gareth Jones recently completed a study on how sports participation impacts high school girls’ leadership skills. The study, “Exploring Perceptions of Prototypical Leadership and Gender Encoding Bias among Aspiring Female Athletes,” included 90 female athletes aged 14 to 18.
“There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that sport is really great for a lot of developmental aspects outside of just on-court performance,” Taylor told Whyy.org. “But we were really interested in what sort of characteristics girls — high school girls specifically — kind of perceive themselves developing, and even a little bit more specifically what they understood those traits to suggest.”
Among other findings, the study pointed to the fact that 80% of female Fortune 500 executives “report having played competitive sport at some point in their lives (Zarya 2017), suggesting sport participation may be linked with traits that are conducive to leadership."
Taylor and Jones used qualitative research to understand how female student-athletes perceived leadership and the gender bias associated with it.
“The participants shared how many of the traits that you might suspect from a leader—assertiveness, charisma and things like that—are acceptable in sports, but even then, there are limits,” Jones said. “So, for instance, participants shared how men’s games are called differently than women’s games; referees will let men be a bit more physical. But when women athletes do the same, they will get whistled, which shows there is this unconscious bias in play for young women when they express those traits.”
Taylor added that, “For young girls playing sports, it really becomes this balancing act for when they can engage in these traits, and when they have to mask those leadership characteristics that have brought them success on the court.”
Both Temple professors reported real-world applications of their study, including the prominence of women coaches in all sports. The two found that high-quality coaches in girls’ youth sports are key to continuing to foster these leadership skills. They also identified implications for women pursuing coaching positions.
“I think that this study really has strong implications in thinking about what we know about gender and coaching,” Taylor said. “The majority of sport coaches are men, and so how does that impact the way that that our young female athletes are being spoken to? Coach education is another area that we commonly talk about, but I don’t know that we do a great job of educating our coaches on a lot of things. This study shows that we need to do better there.”
