Temple study finds sports help young women build leadership skills, but bias still shapes how they show them

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Researchers at Temple University have been studying the impact sports participation has on young women, the development of their leadership traits and the need for high-quality coaching at the youth level.

The study, titled “Exploring Perceptions of Prototypical Leadership and Gender Encoding Bias among Aspiring Female Athletes,” was recently published in the Leisure Sciences scholarly journal. Elizabeth Taylor and Gareth Jones, both professors from Temple’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management, said they were drawn to the topic because leadership traits have been stereotypically deemed as masculine.

“There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that sport is really great for a lot of developmental aspects outside of just on-court performance,” Taylor said. “But we were really interested in what sort of characteristics girls — high school girls specifically — kind of perceive themselves developing, and even a little bit more specifically what they understood those traits to suggest.”

Their research included a focus group of 90 female athletes between the ages of 14 and 18. It found that athletic experience leads to young women being more comfortable showcasing their leadership traits, but the environment they’re in plays a big role.

Taylor said the athletes identified traits like assertiveness and independence, but felt like they could only express them “on the court.”

“They felt like they could be aggressive,” Taylor said. “They could be independent, but when we asked about how do you show leadership in the classroom, or how do you show leadership on the job … They talked about how they felt the need to kind of work harder, while also softening those agentic traits.”

Jones said he was shocked by the responses he received from the athletes, noting how, when they express leadership traits, “it may be taken in a certain way.”

“You’re talking about in some cases freshman and sophomores in high school, not only thinking about, ‘Well, what does it take to be a leader,’ but, ‘What am I going to have to do?’ Recognizing that sort of social stigma and already thinking about, ‘Well, what do I need to do and think about as I enact those traits myself?’” Jones said.

The development of those traits can also be affected by the quality of coaching an athlete receives. Taylor said the training coaches do beyond the “X’s and O’s” impacts the way an athlete conducts themselves and engages with others.

“I think that’s a really important step in the future research of this is understanding the type of training that coaches have, and then how coach behavior impacts athletes’ thoughts of how they can behave,” Taylor said.

The research comes when viewership for women’s sports is growing, but also as participation in women’s athletics grows, particularly at the college level.

“As it pertains to kind of sparking an interest in youth sport participation among young girls specifically, I think I’d be hesitant to say draw any sort of causal link right now, but it is interesting to note in the past year or two, you have seen that participation numbers among young girls start to creep up a bit,” Jones said.

Taylor said more coverage of women’s sports and more access to watching games, such as the WNBA’s recent media rights deal, showcase the importance of investing in female sports in the same way as men’s sports.

“That just illustrates to girls and women that there is the investment in their future as athletes, that there is a belief that they are legitimate athletes and we don’t need to qualify their competencies, we don’t need to question if they’re good enough, we don’t need to compare them to men,” Taylor said.

Other contributors to the research include Katherine Sveinson of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Christine Wegner of the University of Florida and Caroline Heffernan of Northwestern University.