A new study reveals that the bulk of elite sport psychology research – the gospel underpinning women’s athletic grit – has one eye-rolling thing in common. It’s done on men. Could textbook bias be jeopardising female sport?
For the best part of the past three years, Christine Yu has been working on her debut book. As with any ‘first’, a lot could go awry – securing an agent, landing a book deal, actually writing the thing – but Yu’s one certainty was her subject matter. An awardwinning sports and science journalist, Yu wrote Up To Speed: The Groundbreaking Science Of Women Athletes (£25.99, Riverhead) to stomp all over sport’s gender bias. When it launches this May, it will do exactly that – with one exception. Because there’s a topic that not even 900-plus days of research could find women to be anything other than excluded from. ‘There was so little research specific to women that I had to scrap the chapter on sport psychology,’ she says. ‘Our entire understanding of sport psychology is heavily weighted towards men.’
7 The percentage of sport psychology studies using all-women participants
As Yu drew these conclusions, on the other side of the world, psychologist Courtney Walton was quantifying them. A research fellow at Orygen (an Australian mental health organisation for young people) and the University of Melbourne, Dr Walton had already produced psychological studies that showed women experienced more stress in sport than men, such as discrimination and financial difficulties. When the athletes he was working with continued to flag intrinsic gender-based difficulties, he thought about the bigger picture. ‘We wanted to turn our attention to other areas where barriers or bias may prevent women’s sport from properly flourishing, and this led to our examination of the representativeness of the research base,’ he tells Women’s Health.
To do so, Dr Walton and his team picked five leading sport psychology journals and analysed the gender composition of all studies published in 2010, 2015 and 2020. What they found was as hackneyed as a C-suite of white middle-aged men flashing their bonuses on their wrists. Across a total of 627 studies, 54% of participants were men and boys. Around 20% of studies featured male participants exclusively, compared with just 7% for women. The conclusion being that sport psychology studies – which inform the strategies athletes use to reach peak performance – didn’t just significantly marginalise women and girls, they particularly under-represented them in performance topics, such as coaching, mental skills and decision-making. Which makes you wonder: if women are being literally brainwashed out of sport psychology research, what’s the toll on female accomplishment?
Mind of their own
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