Occupational hazards: harassment and womens work as sport coaches

Coaching continues to be a difficult occupational choice for women in Canada, and elsewhere, despite a proliferation of targeted programs, research, and funding initiatives designed to ensure their presence and contribution. Women are vastly underrepresented, especially at the highest levels of Canadian sport. Growing public awareness about the corrosive nature of workplace harassment has not fully permeated conversations about women and coaching. Yet such perspectives are valuable and could provide new insights on how to interrupt and transform discriminatory workplace cultures. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to review the extant literature about harassment and coaching in sport management and other closely related fields; second, to consider what lessons might be learned from feminist theorizing about how to combat harassment in institutional contexts outside of sport. A more systemic and intersectional understanding of gender and sexual harassment in sport could shift the focus away from women coaches and their immediate sporting context to the structural roots and power differentials that make possible and normalize hostility directed at women in their workplace.