Psychological Safety for Women in Sport: Why Are Women in Sport Still Afraid to Speak Up

In every team I have ever coached, there is one moment that tells me almost everything I need to know about the culture of that team. It’s the first time we (coaches) ask a question and wait, in silence, for someone to answer. The players who answer first are usually the loud ones, the confident ones, the men or the boys, the captains. The players who answer last, or don’t answer at all, are very often the female players. Not because they have nothing to say. They have plenty to say. But because somewhere along the way, they learned that saying it would cost them more than staying silent. And that is because psychological safety for women in sport is overall at a critically low level.

In a previous blog post on a similar topic, Psychological Safety in Sports: How to Build Trust and Win, I wrote about what psychological safety is and why it matters for any team that wants to perform at its best. Today, I want to go one layer deeper. Because psychological safety is not distributed equally in sport. It’s not equally available to every athlete who walks into a gym. And the athletes who get the smallest share of it, in my experience, are women.

This is not a comfortable topic. It is also not a topic that lives only in one corner of the world. I have seen it in Asia, where I coached for several seasons. I have seen it in parts of Europe, where I grew up, where I played professionally, and where I coached. And I have seen it in the way young female players carry themselves long before they are old enough to understand why.

So let us talk about this important topic honestly.

Key Takeaways

• Psychological safety is not distributed equally in sport. While the concept applies to every athlete, women receive a smaller share of it almost everywhere in the world. Female athletes report lower psychological safety than male athletes, and elite female athletes report the lowest of all, which is why they are also the least likely to report abuse, injury, or disagreement with their coaches.

• The problem is global, not regional. The pattern shows up in different forms on every continent: cultural hierarchy in Asia, quieter expectations in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, machismo in Latin America, family and structural barriers in the Middle East and North Africa, and “win-at-all-costs” cultures exposed by major scandals in North America and Australia. No country has fully solved this. Pretending the problem is “somewhere else” lets the rest of the world off the hook.

• The pay gap is a loud signal of how little female athletes are valued. In 2025, 58% of female athletes earn less than $25,000 a year from their sport, and half report no net income after expenses. For the third year in a row (2023, 2024, 2025), no woman cracked the world’s top 100 highest-paid athletes, despite Coco Gauff earning a record $31 million. When women are underpaid and easily replaceable, the cost of speaking up becomes prohibitive. Silence becomes survival math.

• The absence of female coaches and leaders shapes how safe women feel. Across six recent elite handball tournaments (Paris 2024 men’s and women’s, Men’s and Women’s EHF Euro 2024, and the 2025 World Championships for both men and women), 156 head coach positions were available. Only 7 went to women. Roughly 4.5%. When every authority figure looks different from a young female athlete, she has to do extra emotional work just to feel that she belongs, work that her male teammates never have to do.

• Change is everyone’s job, and it starts with small daily choices. Coaches can notice who speaks first and who never speaks, ask quiet players direct low-stakes questions, and model vulnerability themselves. Athletes can start small by asking one honest question they would normally hold back. Parents can praise their daughters for advocating for themselves, not only for being polite. Federations can hire more women, pay athletes properly, and make speaking up safer than staying silent.

What Psychological Safety Actually Means for a Female Athlete

Psychological safety, in the simplest terms, is the belief that you can speak up, ask a question, admit a mistake, or disagree with someone in power, without being punished, ridiculed, or pushed out. The concept was popularized by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, and it has since become a cornerstone of how we think about high-performing teams in business, healthcare, and sport.

For a female athlete, psychological safety is the difference between:

• Telling your coach you are injured, versus playing through pain because you are afraid of being labeled “soft” or “dramatic”.
• Saying “I don’t understand the tactic”, versus nodding and pretending, then making the same mistake in the match.
• Reporting a teammate or staff member who crossed a line, versus carrying that experience silently for years.
• Asking for a raise or better contract, versus accepting whatever is offered because at least you are still on the team.

Research backs this up in striking ways. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology found that elite athletes report lower psychological safety than recreational athletes, and are significantly less likely to report interpersonal violence as a result. The higher you climb, the less safe you feel to speak. Another qualitative study of female Division I student-athletes identified “athlete voice suppression” as one of the four main themes shaping team culture, where athletes felt that offering feedback to coaches was a “no-no”, and silence was rooted in fear, not in agreement.

These are not small problems. They affect performance, wellbeing, careers, and in some cases, lives.

What I Saw in Asia: A Culture Where Silence Is the Default

When I was employed in South Korea as part of a group of European coaches, our job was technical. Improve the players. Improve the goalkeepers. Improve the system. But within the first few weeks, all of us realized that the technical work was, in some ways, the easiest part. The hardest part was the silence inside of a team.

The team culture we worked in was built on a very strong, deeply rooted hierarchy. The oldest man in any room is the top authority. Younger men defer to older men. And women defer to almost everyone. This is not something written in a coaching manual. It’s something a child absorbs from the moment they can walk. By the time a young female player arrives at her first serious training session, the rules have been internalized for years: don’t interrupt. don’t contradict. don’t stand out. don’t make eye contact for too long, especially with a man, especially with an older man. Speak only when spoken to, and even then, speak very briefly.

I would ask female players a simple question: “How did that exercise feel? What do you think we could change? Is there anything you want to add?” I would get a few very short sentences, only directly tied to my question, and nothing more. There was no elaboration, or “and another thing”, or any personal opinions. The body language said even more than the words. Many players stood with their posture slightly bent forward, lowering their head when speaking, especially when speaking to a man. Their voice would drop in volume the moment they realized a male staff member was nearby. They would step back physically when an older coach approached, almost without thinking. The whole physiology of deference was already there, fully developed.

I will give you one small example that has stayed with me. Early on, during one of my first practices, the male goalkeepers I was working with did a sequence of exercises really well, and I instinctively raised my hand for a high five. The way I would have done with any goalkeeper I had ever coached, anywhere in the world. And they didn’t know what to do. Not because they did not understand the gesture. They did. But because the gesture was being offered by a woman, and a woman who was also their coach, and giving a high five back meant, in some quiet cultural sense, meeting me as an equal in that moment. Their hands hesitated. One of them tapped my hand so gently you could barely call it contact. Another half-raised his hand and then kind of let it drop. It was honestly funny in the moment, and a little shocking, both at once. I remember thinking: “Oh wow, this is going to take longer than I thought.” After a few months, the two older goalkeepers, who were around 25 years old at the time, were giving me proper high fives without thinking about it. Real, full, equal contact. But the youngest, who was 19 years old at the time, still bent his head down every single time. Every single high five. He would meet my hand, but he would never meet my eyes. I worked with him for a very long time, and that part never fully changed. He simply couldn’t let himself be seen as my equal in that small physical moment, even though, on the court, he was learning to trust me as his coach. He was a wonderful young man and a hard worker. I a, sharing this story because if even a high five between a coach and her goalkeeper carries that much cultural weight, imagine what it costs a young female player to disagree with her male coach, to raise her hand to potentially ask a question, or to say something like: “I think we should try to do this differently”. The body knows the rules long before the mind decides to break them.

This is something the research community is starting to recognize too. A 2025 paper on coaching female athletes published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living highlighted research on how transformational leadership, with an emphasis on inspirational motivation, can be one of the most effective ways to engage women in sport in cultures with strong sociocultural barriers, including a study specifically focused on Saudi Arabian female participation. In other words: in cultures where women are not socially encouraged to take initiative, the coach has to actively invite it. Repeatedly. Patiently. And without punishment when it goes imperfectly the first few times.

That is what we tried to do. We worked hard to create space. We praised players for asking questions, even questions that, in another context, might have been too basic to bother praising. We would split into smaller groups in training, because we noticed that women who would not say a word in front of 15-20 people might say something honest in a group of three. We tried to make it clear that silence was not loyalty. Silence was a missed opportunity.

There were also things I noticed as a female European coach that I think mattered. The female players watched me carefully. Not just my coaching, but my behavior. How I spoke to male staff members. Whether I lowered my eyes when an older man entered the room (I didn’t). Whether I let myself be interrupted (I tried not to). I didn’t always get this perfectly right, and I was operating with the privilege of being a foreign coach who would eventually go home, which is a privilege the local women didn’t have. But I noticed that some of the female players started, very slowly, to mirror small things. Eye contact held a little bit longer. A slightly straighter posture. One more sentence in their answer than they would have given a month before. None of this was dramatic in any way, nobody had a breakthrough moment. But something shifted a little bit. I’m convinced that representation, even temporary representation, did some of that work that no amount of verbal encouragement could have done alone.

It also worked, slowly, with the men. Some male players started to open up, in tiny increments. But the women had the steepest hill to climb. They had to overcome not just the fear of speaking to a coach, but a lifetime of being told that a good woman is a quiet, obedient woman. And there was a tradeoff most outsiders don’t see: the women who did start to open up, who did start to ask questions and offer opinions, were sometimes treated more skeptically by their teammates afterward at the beginning. Speaking up made them visible, and visibility, in a culture that prizes feminine quietness, can be a social liability. So they were not just risking the coach’s reaction. They were risking each other’s.

This is one of the reasons I believe psychological safety for women in sport can’t be discussed without discussing culture. You can’t change a player without understanding the world that shaped her. And you can’t expect that the same coaching toolkit that works in Stockholm (for example) will work in a context where a girl was raised to bow when greeting anyone. The work is the same in spirit, but it has to be much slower, much more patient, and much more aware of what it costs the player to take even one step forward.

It Is Not Just Asia: A Global Pattern

It would be easy and convenient to write this off as something that happens “over there”, in cultures very different from our own. But that would be intellectually dishonest. The patterns I’m describing show up almost everywhere, just dressed in different clothes. Let me walk through what I saw and noticed, region by region, because pretending the problem belongs only to one part of the world lets the rest of the world off the hook.

Europe: from Scandinavian support to Southern and Eastern silence

Scandinavian countries are, in my experience, genuinely supportive environments for female athletes. There is a long tradition of gender equality in sport, in coaching, in leadership, and in the everyday culture surrounding the team. When I work with athletes and coaches from those countries, the conversations are different. They speak, they comment, they push back, they ask questions, and they expect to be heard.

But as soon as you move to certain parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, the picture shifts. In some countries (and I will not name them, because the issue is patterns, not borders), women are still expected to be quieter. More accommodating. More grateful for whatever opportunity they receive. Female players who push back, who ask hard questions, who advocate for themselves, are often described with words like “difficult” or “dramatic” or “ungrateful”. The same player, if she were male, would be called “competitive”, “fighter”, or “a leader”.

This is not always loud or obvious. It rarely shows up as someone literally telling a woman to be quiet. It shows up in the joke a coach makes that everyone laughs at except her. It shows up in the assistant role she is given, no matter her qualifications. It shows up in the assumption that she will, of course, take care of the off-field organizing while the men focus on the “real” coaching. It shows up in the silence that follows when she disagrees with a decision in a meeting.

North America: scandal after scandal exposed what silence cost

If anyone wants to argue that North America has solved this, the last decade has answered them very clearly. The United States produced what is widely described as the largest sexual abuse scandal in sports history: the USA Gymnastics case, in which more than 500 athletes alleged abuse over two decades by coaches, gym owners, and former Olympic team doctor Larry Nassar. USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee paid out close to 900 million US dollars in settlements. Internal documents showed that USAG had received complaints against 54 coaches between 1996 and 2006, and banned only 37. Convicted offenders were, in some cases, allowed to keep coaching!?!…

In 2022, an investigation into the National Women’s Soccer League found systematic emotional, verbal and sexual misconduct by coaches that had been ignored or covered up for years. The report described a league in which complaints from players were repeatedly dismissed and coaches accused of misconduct were quietly recycled from team to team. USA Swimming and US Taekwondo have faced their own multi-victim cases against Olympic-level coaches.

The thread connecting these cases is not coincidence. It is the same thread I’m writing about in this whole post: female athletes didn’t feel safe to speak up, and when they did, the system didn’t protect them. Simone Biles told the US Senate in 2021 that officials and coaches had concealed Nassar’s conduct from her and other Olympians. That is not a problem of individual bad actors. That is a system in which speaking up was unsafe by design.

Latin America: machismo as the operating system

In much of Latin America, the cultural label most often used is “machismo”, and its effects on women in sport are direct. Machismo is a cultural concept of exaggerated masculinity, built around pride, strength, dominance, and the assumption that men are natural providers and protectors. It enforces rigid gender roles, and in its everyday form it shows up as the quiet (and sometimes loud) devaluation of anything coded as feminine: softness, vulnerability, the female voice. It’s most often associated with Latin American cultures, but it’s not unique to them. Versions of it exist almost everywhere, just under different names. In sport, machismo translates into the deeply held belief that the field belongs to men, and that women on it are guests, exceptions, or amateurs.

In Argentina, women’s football was treated as an amateur curiosity for decades, and when the national team went on strike in 2017 to protest structural sexism, players had to crowdfund their own gear, were paid under the table or not at all, and had to fight publicly for the right to be recognized as professionals. Macarena Sánchez had to sue her former club and the Argentine Football Association just to be paid for seven years of play. In Brazil, women’s football was formally banned by law from 1941 until 1979. Aline “Pelle” Pellegrino, captain of Brazil’s national team and an Olympic medalist, has said that in 16 years as a professional she had a legal employment contract for exactly one of them, when she was 15.

What this looks like inside a locker room is the cultural belief that football is “cosa de hombres”, a man’s thing, and that a woman raising her voice in that space is breaking an unspoken rule. The pattern looks different from Asia on the surface (it is louder, more openly contested, with stronger feminist counter-movements like Ni Una Menos pushing back), but the underlying physics are the same: women are expected to be smaller in the room, and the cost of taking up space is high.

Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Africa: structural and family-level barriers

In much of the Middle East and North Africa, female athletes face a layered set of barriers that go beyond the locker room and into the home. Research published in Sociology Compass documents that despite increasing participation in the past two decades, women in many MENA countries still navigate cultural and religious expectations, family veto power, and a near-total absence of female coaches, referees and administrators. Studies in Oman, Iraq, Qatar and Egypt all describe a similar dynamic: a young woman who wants to play seriously often has to negotiate with her family before she can even step onto the field, and once she is there, the coaching staff around her is almost entirely male.

There is real progress. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 has put significant investment into women’s sport infrastructure. Tunisia’s Ons Jabeur has become a tennis icon for the entire region. Qatar is building a dedicated women’s sports stadium. These are not small things. But the broader pattern researchers consistently identify is a shortage of trained female coaches and administrators, and a media landscape that gives female athletes far less visibility than their male counterparts. On the African continent more broadly, scholars writing in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living have argued that the experience of women in coaching has been shaped by colonial legacies, poverty, and patriarchal systems that intersect in ways the Global North research community often misses entirely.

Australia: a “win at all costs” culture and the silencing of athlete voices

If anyone thinks the Anglosphere outside North America has avoided this, Australia’s 2021 Change the Routine report should end that argument. Following the documentary Athlete A, the Australian Human Rights Commission conducted an independent review into gymnastics, a sport in which 77% of Australia’s roughly 231,000 participants are female and 91% are under the age of 12. The report’s findings were damning. It identified a “win-at-all-costs” approach, a “culture of control”, a tolerance of negative and authoritarian coaching behavior, body shaming, weight-based humiliation, and (in the report’s own framing) “the silencing of athlete voices”.

One former gymnast wrote: “Over time, I was conditioned to accept being yelled at, be berated, humiliated, submissive, follow orders, not laugh, be emotionless and, worst of all, conditioned to accept that the coach’s behavior was normal, acceptable.” That is a sentence about Australia, written by an Australian woman, about an Australian system!?! The Commission made twelve recommendations and Gymnastics Australia issued a formal apology, but a 2025 NRL Players Association survey found that the men’s and women’s rugby leagues are still rated only at C-level for psychological safety. The work is far from done.

What this list adds up to

Sport reflects culture. It doesn’t exist in a separate universe. So if a society broadly expects women to be agreeable, sport will too. The locker room becomes an extension of the living room. And what I want any reader who lives in a “good” country to take from this section is that there is no continent on earth that has fully solved this. The forms differ, the volumes differ, the legal protections differ, but the underlying pattern is global. Pretending the problem is somewhere else, in some other culture, is the most comfortable, and the least useful, thing we can do with it.

The Pay Gap: A Loud Signal of How Much Female Athletes Are Valued

If you want to know how psychologically safe female athletes feel to speak up, look at how much they are paid. Money is not just money. It is a signal. It tells an athlete how much her work, her body, her years of sacrifice, are valued by the system that profits from her performance.

The numbers in 2025 are still difficult (and painful) to read.

A recent industry analysis reported that 58% of female athletes earn less than $25,000 per year from their sport, which is below the U.S. median individual income. According to a Parity survey of 500 professional women athletes across 55 sports, half of the respondents reported no net income from their sport after accounting for related expenses. Read that again. Half. They are working, training, competing, traveling, and ending the year financially behind.

In professional basketball, the gap is almost satirical. The 2025 NFL salary cap is $279.2 million per team. The WNBA salary cap is $1.57 million per team. Caitlin Clark, the WNBA’s number one draft pick in 2024, signed a rookie salary of around $77,000. Victor Wembanyama, the NBA’s top pick, signed for $12.2 million. The mascot of the Denver Nuggets earns more annually than the highest-paid WNBA players. And that is not a typo!

In global terms, no woman has appeared in the top 100 highest-paid athletes for three straight years (2023, 2024, and 2025), according to Sportico. The highest-paid female athlete in 2025, tennis star Coco Gauff at $31 million, would have ranked No. 122 on a deeper list. The cutoff to crack the top 100 was $37.9 million. Globally, soccer’s professional women players earn roughly 25 cents for every dollar male soccer players earn, according to CNN reporting. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report estimates that achieving overall gender parity will take 123 years at the current pace!!! In sport, the gap is likely even wider!

There are some bright spots in sports as well. Tennis has had equal Grand Slam prize money for years. Surfing went equal in 2019. Cricket made a major equal-pay commitment in 2023. The U.S. women’s national soccer team won their landmark equal-pay deal in 2022. Some 83% of sports globally now offer equal prize money in flagship events, according to a BBC analysis. These are real victories worth celebrating.

But pay parity in flagship events is not the same as pay equity across an athlete’s career… Most female athletes are not playing in the Wimbledon final. They are playing in domestic leagues, lower-tier tournaments, and developmental systems where the money is still very far from equal.

Why does this matter for psychological safety? Because when you are underpaid, undervalued, and easily replaceable, the cost of speaking up gets much higher. If a male athlete with a multi-million-dollar contract pushes back against his coach, he has a buffer. If a female athlete earning $25,000 a year pushes back, she risks losing not just a contract but her livelihood, her career, and her reputation in a small ecosystem where word travels fast. Silence, in that context, is not weakness. It is “survival math”…

You can’t ask women to speak up freely while paying them as if they are lucky to be there at all!

Why Most Coaches Are Still Men, and Why That Matters

There is one more piece of this puzzle that I can’t leave out, because I live it every day. Most coaches in most sports are men. The numbers tell the story almost too clearly.

At the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, while the athletes themselves reached close to gender parity at 48% female, only 13% of coaches were female. At the 2025 UEFA Women’s European Championship, only 7 of 16 national teams were led by a female head coach, which actually represents progress: in 2013, the same number was 18.75%. In the United States, the picture is more sobering. Before Title IX in 1972, over 90% of women’s collegiate sports teams were coached by women. Today, that number sits at around 41%. Less than half of women’s teams are coached by women, and women head-coach only 6% of NCAA men’s teams. According to European parliamentary research cited in 2025, 85% of sports media coverage is dedicated to male athletes. The International Olympic Committee has 38 female members out of 152 total. Fewer than 20% of decision-making roles in major sports federations are held by women.

In my own sport, handball, the picture is even more harsh. I want to walk you through six most recent elite tournaments, because the pattern is more striking when you see it laid out together.

At the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in the women’s handball tournament, all 12 head coaches were men. Norway, the gold medallists, were led by Thorir Hergeirsson. France, the silver medallists and hosts, were led by Olivier Krumbholz. Denmark, the bronze medallists, were led by Jesper Jensen. Across the entire elite women’s competition at the Olympics, in a sport where roughly 800,000 women play worldwide and where every athlete on the court is female, not a single national team was led by a female head coach. On the men’s side at Paris 2024, the picture was identical: all 12 head coaches were also men. Denmark (Nikolaj Jacobsen, gold), Germany (Alfred Gíslason, silver), Spain (Jordi Ribera, bronze), and the rest, all led by men. So across both Olympic handball tournaments combined, 24 out of 24 head coaches were men. The world’s biggest stage for our sport, and not one woman behind the bench!

At the Men’s EHF EURO 2024 in Germany, where 24 teams competed and France won the title, all 24 head coaches were men. At the Women’s EHF EURO 2024 in Austria, Hungary and Switzerland, with 24 teams competing, only two head coaches were women: Monique Tijsterman of co-hosts Austria, and Suzana Lazović of Montenegro. The EHF itself highlighted this on day three of the tournament, noting that the two women were “the only two female head coaches at the tournament” and that Lazović took over from another woman, Bojana Popović. Two out of 24 is roughly 8%.

At the 2025 IHF Men’s World Championship co-hosted by Croatia, Denmark and Norway, with 32 teams competing, all 32 head coaches were men. Coaches ranged from the oldest Alfred Gíslason (born 1959) to the youngest, Michael Apelgren (born 1984), with an average age of 52.6 years, and not a single woman among them.

At the 2025 IHF Women’s World Championship co-hosted by Germany and the Netherlands, with 32 teams competing, the IHF itself confirmed that five women stood on the sidelines as head coaches: Helle Thomsen (Denmark), Suzana Lazović (Montenegro), Monique Tijsterman (Austria), Marizza Faria (Paraguay), and Ana Cristina Teixeira Seabra (Iran). Five out of 32 is around 16%, the strongest representation across any of these six tournaments. There is one detail I want to highlight, because it tells you how slow this change has been: Helle Thomsen is only the second female head coach in the entire history of Denmark’s women’s national team, after Else Birkmose, who led the team from 1963 to 1965. That is a 60-year gap between Denmark’s first and second female head coaches. S i x t y    y e a r s.

Add it all up. Across these six tournaments, 156 head coach positions in total. Seven were held by women. Roughly 4.5%.

A note on what I can’t tell you. I tried to pull the same numbers for assistant coaches and goalkeeper coaches across these tournaments. Most of that information is not reported publicly. Federations don’t release full staff lists in a consistent way, and tournament news rarely covers anyone beyond the head coach. From everything I’ve seen working in this sport, the picture for assistant coaches and goalkeeper coaches looks similar to the head coach picture, sometimes worse. But I’m not going to put numbers in a blog post that I can’t verify. The head coach data alone makes the point clearly.

I want to be precise about what I’m observing here. I’m not saying these male coaches are bad coaches. Many of them are exceptional, and several have built generational dynasties (Hergeirsson’s 15 years at Norway; Krumbholz’s seven Olympic campaigns at France; Jacobsen’s hat-trick of world titles with Denmark). The point is structural: when the most successful, most visible, most decorated voices in elite handball are almost entirely male, on both the men’s and women’s side, the message to a young female player who dreams of one day coaching at this level is that the door is heavy, and the people who get to walk through it usually don’t look like her. And it is also worth noting honestly that when France hired Sébastien Gardillou to replace Krumbholz, and Norway hired Ole Gjekstad to replace Hergeirsson, two of the most successful women’s handball federations in the world had a chance to appoint a female head coach to lead their women’s national team, after their decorated long-serving male coaches retired. Both chose another man.

There are early signs of progress. Helle Thomsen at Denmark, Tijsterman at Austria, Lazović at Montenegro, and the broader picture of five women head-coaching at the 2025 World Championship represent a genuine shift compared to where we were even five years ago. Tijsterman herself made a small piece of history before Austria: in 2015, she became the first woman ever to lead a men’s team into the group phase of an EHF club competition, with OCI Lions. The fact that this was possible only ten years ago tells you how recent this conversation really is. Progress is happening. It’s just very, very slow.

I want to be precise about something here. There is nothing inherently wrong with male coaches! Many of them are excellent, kind, and committed to their athletes. I have worked with many of them, learned from many of them, and consider some of them mentors. The problem is not the existence of male coaches. The problem is the absence of female ones, and what that absence does to the psychology of the young women coming up through the system.

When a young female athlete walks into a sport, the people in power, the head coaches, the technical directors, the federation presidents, the medical staff, are mostly men. The absence of female role models in leadership positions tells a young female player something, even if no one says it out loud: this is not your space. You are a guest here. You can play, but the system was not built for you, and the people who run it don’t look like you. That message is absorbed silently and shapes how she carries herself for the rest of her career.

The body and life-stage gap

For a woman to feel psychologically safe in a sport where every authority figure looks different from her, she has to do extra emotional work that male athletes simply don’t have to do. She has to translate her experiences across a gender line. She has to wonder if her coach will understand her menstrual cycle, her injury risks, her body image stress, her family pressures, her postpartum return, without her having to explain everything from zero.

This is not abstract. Female athletes have higher rates of certain injuries (ACL tears, stress fractures, patellofemoral problems) than men, and the recovery context is different. Research on relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) has shown that female athletes are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of under fueling, and the early signs (missed cycles, mood changes, performance plateaus) are exactly the kinds of things a player will not bring up if she does not feel safe with her coach. A 2024 review on the psychological aspects of return to sport for female athletes pointed out that female athletes face significant barriers when disclosing incidents of violence and abuse, in part because of “entrenched power imbalances in sports” and “inadequate action by sports authorities” when reports are made.

A male coach can absolutely learn this. Many do. But the burden is on the player to figure out whether she has one of the male coaches who has done the homework, or one of the male coaches who has not. And while she is figuring that out, she is also expected to perform.

Female coaches face their own trial

The women who do make it into coaching face their own version of this problem, and it is worth being honest about it because it explains why the pipeline does not fix itself.

Research published in 2025 in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living on women in coaching and leadership found that female coaches consistently face barriers their male counterparts don’t: limited access to mentorship, unequal professional development opportunities, and biases that challenge their credibility. They are often expected to handle “team manager” or “team guide” duties that take them away from the actual coaching work, while their male colleagues are pushed forward. They are held to higher standards than men in applying for leadership positions. When they are hired, they are sometimes promoted too quickly, without the support structures around them that would let them succeed, and then judged when things don’t go perfectly.

There is also what researchers call the “queen bee” trap, although the term is contested and the dynamic itself is more complicated than the label suggests. The basic pattern: when there are very few women in leadership, the few who reach the top are often pressured (consciously or not) to behave in ways the male-dominated culture rewards, which sometimes means being harder on the women below them than they would be on the men. This is not a personal failing. It is a system failing. When you are the only woman in the room, the cost of advocating for other women is high, and the cost of fitting in is sometimes lower. Untangling that requires more than one woman at a time. It requires enough women in leadership that no single one of them has to carry the symbolic weight alone.

What I have lived myself

I want to step out from behind the research for a moment, because I know this part of the post not only as a coach who reads a lot of studies all the time, but as a woman who has spent her entire professional life inside the sports.

As a female goalkeeper coach, there were years when I wouldn’t even be considered for a coaching position, simply because I was a woman. Not because of my credentials, or because of my work. But because of my gender. I know this because some of the head coaches who wanted me on their staff had to fight, sometimes very hard, to get me in. Some federations doing the hiring would say things like: “Yes, her credentials are great, yes, her work looks very good, but she is a woman…”. That was the sentence. That was the ceiling. The head coach would have to push, advocate, lobby, convince them basically that: “Even though she is a woman, she is a great coach”, just to bring me in as part of the staff. I’m deeply grateful to the head coaches who did that. But the fact that they had to fight at all just because of the fact that I’m a female coach tells you everything about the system…

Throughout my career, I have felt that I had to work ten times harder than my male counterparts to be taken seriously. Not twice as hard, but literally ten times harder. And that is not a number I’m exaggerating to make a point. It’s honestly what the math felt like, year after year.

The hardest part was at the beginning of my coaching career, about 15 years ago… Often, I was dismissed, sidelined, or simply not considered, mostly because I was a woman. Also because I was young. And when those two things were not enough to disqualify me, the third one was that I was Bosnian!?! Remembering that still makes me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t choose where I was born. And I couldn’t choose to be born as a woman. And those are not professional qualifications. Those are not coaching credentials. Those are pure facts of birth. And yet, in some big and well-known projects, those facts alone were enough to stop respected names from hiring me…

So I worked my way forward! I worked hard with the highest level of passion, excitement, love, interest, and curiosity I could bring to the coaching job. Always. Every session. Every goalkeeper that I ever worked with. Every video analysis. I worked extremely hard, partly because that is who I am, but also, I will admit, partly to prove my worth. To prove that even though I am a woman, I am still a dedicated, hard-working, and good coach. That sentence shouldn’t have to exist. A coach should be evaluated on her work, her athletes’ development, her tactical understanding, her ability to build trust. Not on whether she had to add the disclaimer “even though I am a woman” to her own description of herself.

I’m sharing this not to make the article about me. I’m sharing it because every female coach reading this will recognize at least some part of it, and every male coach reading this should know that this is what the women working alongside him have likely lived. The research I cited above (about credibility bias, mentorship gaps, double standards in hiring) is not abstract. It is not data points on a chart. It’s the daily experience of women in coaching. It’s the hours we spent justifying our existence in a profession we earned the right to be in.

And here is the thing that connects this directly back to the topic of this whole article: when women in coaching are met with this kind of resistance, what message does it send to the female athletes watching? It tells them that even excellence is not enough. It tells them that the path they might dream of one day taking, into coaching, into leadership, into setting the culture themselves, is going to require fighting battles their male peers will never have to fight… That awareness shapes whether a young female athlete believes she can speak up, take initiative, and lead. Psychological safety for female athletes and structural barriers for female coaches are not two separate problems. They are the same problem, lived at two different stages of a woman’s career in sport.

What actually changes things when it comes to psychological safety for women in sport

This is not a reason to push male coaches out. It’s a reason to bring more women in, at every level, and to train the male coaches who are already there in the specific psychological and physical realities of female athletes. Both things, at the same time. UK Sport’s Female Coaches Leadership Programme, World Rugby’s 40% target for female high-performance coaching at the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup, and The FA’s 75% target for female head coaches in the women’s game by 2024 are all attempts to do this structurally rather than waiting for organic change.

But quotas and targets are only part of the answer. The deeper work is everyday work, and it falls on male coaches to do most of it. Asking themselves how their language, their assumptions, their jokes, their default reactions might be making the women on their team feel just slightly less safe to speak. Noticing whose ideas they amplify and whose they let drop. Noticing whether they would coach and have the same conversation differently if the player in front of them were a man. That kind of self-examination is uncomfortable, but it is the difference between a coach who creates psychological safety for women and a coach who only thinks he does!

What Coaches, Athletes, and Parents Can Actually Do

I don’t want to end this with a checklist, because checklists make complex things feel simpler than they are. But I do want to leave you with some practical thoughts woven into what we have already discussed in this article, things you can take into your team, your organization, your locker room, your living room, this week.

For coaches, especially male coaches working with female athletes: notice who speaks first in your meetings, and who never speaks at all. Notice whose ideas get repeated and credited, and whose get ignored until a man says the same thing. Ask a quiet player a direct, specific, low-stakes question, and then wait. Don’t fill the silence. Female athletes are very often waiting for permission to speak, and your patience is that permission. Also, model vulnerability yourself. Admit your own mistakes out loud. The research is consistent: psychological safety grows when leaders go first.

For female athletes, especially the ones reading this and recognizing themselves: your voice is not a problem to be managed! It is a tool to be developed! Start small. Ask one question in training this week that you would normally hold back. Tell one coach one true thing about how you are feeling. Find one teammate who feels the same as you and start a quiet alliance. You don’t have to become loud overnight. You have to become honest, gradually.

For parents of young female athletes: pay attention to how you speak about confidence, ambition, and disagreement at home. The girl who is told at age eight that “good girls don’t argue” becomes the player at age eighteen who can’t tell her coach she is hurt. Praise her for asking questions, not just for being polite. Praise her for advocating for herself, not just for being a “team player”. The two are not opposites.

For sports federations and decision-makers, if any of you are reading: Please, hire more women! There are amazing women leaders and coaches! So you don’t have to hire them “only because they are women”, but because they deserve it with their credentials, their quality, and their dedication! Pay them properly. Put them on panels where the decisions actually get made, not just on the welcome committee. Audit your pay structures. Audit your reporting structures, especially for harassment and abuse. Make speaking up the safer option, not the more dangerous one. The research is unambiguous on this. Athletes who don’t feel psychologically safe don’t report interpersonal violence! The cost of that silence is human, and it is overwhelming!

Psychological Safety For Women In Sport – Closing Thought

I started this post with the image of a quiet female player in a room full of louder voices. I want to end it with a different image.

I want to imagine a young female handball goalkeeper, somewhere in the world. She is fifteen. She makes a mistake in training. She walks back to her line. She doesn’t lower her eyes. She doesn’t bow her head. She turns to her coach (who might be a man, or might be a woman) and says, “Can we talk about that one? I don’t think I read the angle right?”. And the coach says, “Yes. Tell me what you saw, I want to hear what you have to say”.

That is psychological safety. That is what I want for every female athlete I will ever coach, and every female athlete I will never meet. Not silence, and not perfection. Just the freedom to speak up, ask questions, disagree, and Grow, the same freedom her male teammates have always had.

We are not there yet. Not in Asia. Not in parts of Europe. Not in North America. Not in Latin America. Not in the Middle East and North Africa. Not in Australia. Not even in the most progressive corners of sport. But we are closer than we were ten years ago, and we will be closer still in ten years if coaches, athletes, parents, and federations choose to make it so!

The work is not finished. But the serious conversation about this topic is just starting. And that, in itself, is a kind of progress. 🙂

If this post made you reflect on your own team or coaching practice, I would love to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment below, or contact me if you would like to talk about coaching, consulting, or increasing psychological safety work for your organization. You can also read the foundation post in this series, Psychological Safety in Sports: How to Build Trust and Win, and subscribe to my newsletter so you never miss a new piece.

Sources and further reading

• Edmondson, A. (1999, 2018). The foundational work on team psychological safety, Harvard Business School.
• Walton, C. C. et al. (2025). Elite athletes report lower psychological safety and are less likely to report interpersonal violence compared to recreational athletes. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology.
• Athletic Director U. (2022). Cultivating Psychologically Safe Team Environments. Qualitative study of female DI student-athletes.
• ScienceDirect (2022). Creating the conditions for psychological safety and its impact on quality coach-athlete relationships.
• MacNamara, Á. & Collins, D. (2025). Editorial: Women in coaching and leadership. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.
• Carson et al. and Alruwaili (2025). Research on coaching female athletes, transformational leadership, and Saudi Arabian female participation in sport. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.
• WeCOACH (2024-2025). Women in College Coaching Report Card.
• NCAA (2025). Women’s representation in NCAA sports and leadership roles.
• Coach.ca (2025). Assessing the Current State of Women Coaches in High-Performance Sport.
• Bird & Bird (2024). Beyond the sidelines, empowering female leaders in sport.
• van Niekerk, M. et al. (2024). Psychological Aspects of Return to Sport for the Female Athlete. PMC.
• Australian Human Rights Commission (2021). Change the Routine: Independent Review into Gymnastics in Australia.
• US Soccer / Yates Report (2022). Investigation into abuse and misconduct in the National Women’s Soccer League.
• Wikipedia / The Indianapolis Star (2016 onwards). USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal coverage and case law.
• Harkness, G. & Hongsermeier, N. (2015). Female Sports as Non-Movement Resistance in the Middle East and North Africa. Sociology Compass.
• Where are the African voices and perspectives of women in sport coaching? (2022). Frontiers in Sports and Active Living / PMC.
• Elsey, B. & Nadel, J. (2019). Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America.
• UN Women (2024-2025). Sport for Generation Equality reporting and Brazil-focused features.
• UN Women (2025). Gender Snapshot 2025 and equal pay reporting.
• Parity Now (2025). It’s 2025 And The Gender Pay Gap In Sports Is Still An Outrage.
• Sportico (2025). Top 100 highest-paid athletes data.
• World Economic Forum (2025). Global Gender Gap Report 2025.
• BBC analysis (2025) on equal prize money across global sports.
• Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (2022). Listening to Athletes’ Voices: National Team Athletes’ Perspectives on Advancing Safe Sport.

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