"Coach education must stop being a band-aid on a broken limb."

The entire coach education system needs to be reimagined.

When it comes to coach education for women, the sports industry has spent years building what it calls “safe spaces”, separate, women-only programmes designed to provide support, comfort, and confidence. But what if these very spaces are reinforcing the problem? What if, by sheltering women from the realities of sport's deep-rooted misogyny, we're preparing them to survive in isolation rather than succeed in integration?

In their powerful paper Alienation, Othering and Reconstituting: An Alternative Future for Women’s Coach Education, Kerry Harris, Robyn Jones, and Sofia Santos don’t mince words. They argue that women-only courses have become a form of “defensive othering,” rooted more in separation than solution. These programs, while well-intentioned, often duplicate mainstream content without addressing the systemic forces that push women out of coaching to begin with. In doing so, they risk cementing an "us versus them" mentality that does little to disrupt the status quo.