The concept of gendered learning isn’t simply for the benefit of females in sport. It’s to lift everyone involved in sport in Aotearoa, and support all people in organisations to work together to do their best job.
We sat down and talked to three women at the forefront of Women in High Performance Sport who’ve all experienced success in high performance coaching roles: Helene Wilson, netball coach and Women in High Performance Sport lead; Jody Cameron, basketball coach and Te Hāpaitanga programme lead; and Angie Dougal, Olympic trampoline coach and Wā Kāinga Core Knowledge programme lead.
These wāhine want to share the importance of gendered learning. And they have a simple message for sports leaders: Don’t be afraid.
“Gendered learning is giving the space for women coaches and leaders to be more skilful in their craft, language and communication. To practice doing things differently without being judged in the harsh world out there,” Helene Wilson says. “It’s not a secret society. But there’s nowhere else for women to practice their skills if they’re only woman in leadership or coaching.”
Helene, you came into the Women in High Performance Sport role after coaching the victorious Mystics netball franchise. Why was it important to introduce gendered learning to your programmes?
Helene Wilson: I was a mentor in the very first cohort of the Te Hāpaitanga coach development programme, and I sat down with another mentor, Richard Smith, who’s a very experienced coach developer in rugby and cricket, to debrief after the first residential workshop.
I remember him saying he’d never been in an all-woman environment like this before, and he’d learned so much – because the engagement, depth and level of emotion that’s woven into the way women learn is significantly different to the way men learn.
I’ve learned over the years, when you get a group of women together all working with a common purpose to be a high performance coach or leader (like in our Residency Experience programme), we’re being the best version of ourselves for sport. And the energy, emotion and connection in the room is special.
It’s not that men can’t do that – an all-male gendered learning space (which sport has been for over a century) – there’s a special energy to that as well. But women come at it from a different point of view, because we think differently.
How did you work out the best way for women coaches to learn, share and grow?
Helene: There’s a lot of evidence around women flourishing under mentorship, and I saw the cross-code connections that were happening in Te Hāpaitanga. But I also had my Mystics lens on, knowing when you get coaches together to talk about coaching, sometimes that’s not enough. You need connection across organisations and across roles.
So I thought we needed to enable women to know there are others out there who they can speak to in a safe space, who may see the world the same way they do. To set up a cross-role network to accelerate the learning, so if they get the opportunity to work in sport – which is what the Residency Experience provides – they can accelerate the learning they need incredibly quickly through this safe learning space with other women, going through the same experiences at the same time.
We started gendered learning through Te Hāpaitanga and the emerging coaches but wanted to create a wider network, make more connections across sport. So now women are introducing gendered learning in their own sports so those people can be elevated into cross-sport learning.
We’ve had more than 60 women come through Te Hāpaitanga and around 30 in the Residency programme. Then some of those women have started networks within their own sport. Like Kim Smith, who created a mentoring programme for volleyball coaches based on support she received through her Residency Experience. Volleyball NZ now has a coach in Te Hāpaitanga, Liz Hanna, who came through that volleyball programme.
So we’ve been quietly chipping away in the background.
Angie, you’ve been both a successful athlete and coach in high performance sport. How would gendered learning have changed your coaching experience if you’d experienced it earlier in your career?
Angie Dougal: Who knows, right? I think I was really lucky to have a teaching background. I did a conjoint degree in English which allows me to find the right words to use in different environments. But it’s only recently, I’ve realised the power of the language we use, the narrative, the stories we tell and the way we communicate.
Through Teachers’ College, I found my tribe of women along the way. It can be hard to find your way as a woman in sport, but that’s the beauty of having the Te Hāpaitanga and Residency Experience programmes – your tribe is more easily coordinated. I think it would have made a difference to me coming through the coaching ranks to have found my tribe earlier.
In gymnastics in New Zealand, the majority of coaches in the early stages are female because it’s volunteer-based, so you get mums or former athletes doing it for free. But they get to a level where they feel they don’t have the experience or the confidence, and their athletes are passed on to male coaches.
Internationally, I’m usually the only woman on the floor at a world championships and Olympic Games. At the Tokyo Games, we had a male physio, and everyone would walk over and talk to him, assuming he was the coach, and I was the physio. He was constantly having to say, ‘Nah bro, not me’.
At the Paris Olympics, I was one of only six female coaches (62 were male). But you just get on with your job.
We have all these amazing female athletes, but women coaches aren’t coming through – and it can be because they don’t have a tribe to stand on their shoulders. That’s what Te Hāpaitanga and the Residency programmes are providing – a network of women where everyone can stand on each other’s shoulders, and leverage off each other’s greatness.
Then when you’re struggling, you can go and speak to someone, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, me too… Yeah, we’re all feeling the same, in our NSOs, in our clubs or in our communities’. And sometimes someone will say, ‘Have you tried this?’ Or sometimes it’s just the act of sharing that allows you to say, ‘I’ve downloaded that, now I can carry on again.’ I just don’t think there are enough of those spaces.
Men probably don’t realise they have those spaces all the time, because they socialise with each other after sports events. Women don’t always feel comfortable doing that.
So Jody, why do women think and learn differently?
Jody Cameron: I think it’s because of the innate relationship women have with each other; the way we’re built to nurture and want to bring people along with us. The bigger picture is always front of mind.
Generally women want to bring people with them, and the good ones know how to do it without feeling like it diminishes their power. That leads into leadership around future, and we’re always looking to address stuff. We’re well ahead of the eight ball, but we just narrate it differently.
Language has been a barrier for women. Through society, the phrases, terms and words in our vocabulary come from male-dominated leadership. It’s a language women have to use so men can understand us, because that’s the only way you’re going to survive, or get traction. And if we are getting traction, it’s often only one of us, so it’s hard to keep up the sustainability.
The other hurdle we face is around failure. The moment you fail, second chances don’t come around for a woman. You’ve already been judged and you’re done. As a coach, I want to have the opportunity to lose.
But with critical mass, we can make a movement. Helene and I have been tasked with holding open a crevice, holding one rod each in the wedge, and now Angie has come along and she can push through.
It’s all very new, so it’s going to be discovering and failing as we go along and get some sort of dynamic where in 10 to 20 years’ time, you can see the evolution of women in leadership.
Helene, you talk about suspended judgement in the women’s space – withholding judgement and being open-minded. How do you use that in gendered learning?
Helene: We’re in a high performance environment where failing isn’t always seen as a learning opportunity, but a judgment assessment. Like Jody says, why can’t we give women the opportunity to fail?
The gendered learning space we create allows women to say, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know if I’ve made the right decision. Can you look at what I’ve done and give me some feedback?’
We suspend judgment, and instead, upskill the women on critical feedback, accountability, and taking on board feedback in a non-emotive, but a factual, performance-enhanced way.
Gendered learning also gives us a space to address some narratives around women in sport. There’s research that says women lack confidence. During my time on the Coach Accelerator programme, we visited the police force, where the head of recruitment talked to us about how women aren’t confident and don’t know what their strengths are.
We’ve all heard these narratives in the media and in our personal lives. So I’m now telling women, ‘We don’t mention the word confidence here’. We’re changing the narrative.
A lack of confidence is a basic feeling and emotion that all humans have. But because women are verbal, social, connectors and relaters, they talk about it. They’re prepared to talk about a mistake they’ve made and the learning they had from that.
Jody is great at holding one-on-one conversations where she holds the women accountable, to not talking these narratives that society puts on women. We’re going to change the narrative. And this is the narrative that’s required if you want to be in high performance one day.
There are trailblazing women already in high performance – who may be the only woman in their space and close the door behind them. We need experienced women to bring others up and learn off the new crop of women coming through who have a different approach. It will enhance their wellbeing, team dynamics, and help culture. There are so many positives from having difference around the table in HP.
Jody, how has your experience through basketball – quite often being the only female head coach in an environment – shaped the way you approach things now?
Jody: I pride myself on using my spaces to bring other women with me. Sometimes there’s nothing for me to get out of it – it’s purposely so the women have an opportunity or space, or they’re seen. And a lot of women don’t understand that that’s enough.
I’ve been told in my life that I’m very compassionate. I hope that’s what I’m remembered for over being a fierce competitor, or wanting to dominate something or to go somewhere, or being a leader. And that’s really hard for a coach like me who wants to win, all the time.
Angie, as one of the few high performance female coaches in your sport, the cross-code networking must be so beneficial. But do all women need gendered learning?
Angie: Some people question, ‘Do women need a gendered space?’ I think the answer is, ‘Yes, and…’ As you move through anything, you’ve got to find your tribe who’ll help you get through that situation. And for me, that doesn’t matter whether it’s gendered or not, but that should be one of the options.
Daryl Gibson, Head of High Performance Coaching, asked if I’d be interested in getting together with five top female coaches every month or two. And I was like, ‘Absolutely!’ But that doesn’t mean it will be all of my education and all of my personal development.
As coach consultants we’ve been discussing all the different learning environments we can set up, because no one’s the same and no one knows what they don’t know. So if you give them different learning opportunities to dip in and out of, they’ll quickly work out what works and doesn’t work for them. And where they really need the support right now.
Men have a role to play in gendered learning, too. And it’s important female coaching networks aren’t seen as secret societies, right?
Helene: Sports shouldn’t be afraid of gender learning! Yes, it’s part of what we’re doing, but we’re also open to working with them, so they shouldn’t be scared to come and talk to us. It’s learning for everyone.
Men need to understand they should be providing the space for women to learn in a way that’s natural and comfortable to them, as well as learning together.
So my challenge to men is: If you’ve got women in your high performance space, put your hand up for the same learning opportunity. In some sports, I’ve worked with as many men as I have women. And it’s simply coaching to work better together – that’s a beautiful learning picture, right?
The good men – and there are plenty of good men in high performance sport – are curious about how they can coach female athletes better, and how they can bring more female coaches into their environment.
We can get better performance outcomes for everyone by thinking about the quality of our leadership and how we do these things better together. We’re going to make traction really quickly, but people must be open to admitting, ‘We’re not perfect in what we do right now, we haven’t got all the answers, even if we’re the most successful sport’.
And it’s okay to be fearful of what we find. But with women in sport, there’s no judgment. We just work out how to be better together.
We need to go out to the sports sector now and ask: Where’s the place for gender learning in your sport? How can you add gender diversity to your decision-making table? How does everyone feel they can add value and be valued for what they have to offer?
Let’s figure out the answers together.
