The socially reproductive labor of women sport coaches

Although attention has been paid to a range of issues influencing women’s lack of advancement into high-level sport coaching, little critical attention has been paid to the nature of sport coaching as work, and even less attention has been paid to women’s experiences of sport coaching as work. This chapter will share data from a larger study that explored gender, work, and professionalization of sport coaching in the Canadian university sport system. Drawing on feminist political economy, this study focused on the sport-work-gender nexus, with particular attention paid to the demands placed on, and taken up by, women sport coaches to perform socially reproductive labor. The data demonstrate how women’s labor within (and outside) sport is deeply enmeshed in, and shaped by, broader relations of daily life. As a result, women sport coaches more frequently assume and perform the invisible labor of social reproduction, including care work and emotion management.