The 50s, 60s & gender blindness

Right up until the 1960s there was an unspoken assumption in many quarters of athletics that women and girls could and should not train as hard as males. The changes in attitude that have occurred (in common with many developments and fads in coaching) have been predominantly due to the examples of individual successful athletes in partnership with their (usually male) coaches.

Examples: Mary Rand coached by John Le Mesurier; Ann Packer coached by Dennis Watts and strongly influenced by a group of very hard working male athletes led by Robbie Brightwell and John Cooper; Ann Smith coached by Gordon Pirie; Lillian Board, coached by her father and Dennis Watts; and more recently Liz McColgan coached by John Anderson; Judy Oakes coached by Mike Winch and Paula Radcliffe coached by Alec and Rosemary Stanton, and many others.

In the 21st Century, we are only just at the point were men and women have equal access to the full range of athletics events. Women were not allowed to run marathons until the 70s, the first Olympic marathon and 400 hurdles for women not being until 1984. At the end of the 80s steeplechase, 5 and 10k, pole vault and triple jump were still deemed unsuitable for “the ladies” – judgements based on prejudice, not science.

So we could say that athletics has slowly, but successfully emerged from the culturally driven, Victorian constraints which lasted at least until the early 60s. The emerging gender-blind approaches, based on the sport science available at the time, enabled training loads for females to fit their true capacity, and this produced a significant advance in female performance. However several factors experienced by British women’s athletics in the 80s had a serious effect on morale, opportunities and standards. These were:

The result of this was stagnation in the development of British women’s athletics, partly illusory due to comparison with drug induced performances and partly real due to low morale, insufficient support and the gradual athletic emancipation of women from other cultures. The recognition of these factors, especially the discriminatory attitudes and the resulting psychological impact on performance, started to raise questions about gender appropriate coaching. These questions are still incompletely resolved, for, although the drug regimes are gone and lottery funding has now equalised the playing field for the highest performing women, sport science has been slow to address relevant gender difference and has been ill-equipped to address the impact of cultural disadvantage on female performance psychology. Furthermore the content of coach education, having been caught up in complex organisational cul-de-sacs over the last decade, has arguable not kept pace, hence the need for this website in the year 2008.

Even today it is still not unusual to hear commentators and announcers refer to the "Ladies' high jump", etc. Indeed, "Ladies'" golf and tennis is endemic! This is an example of the complex nuances of language. Objective, universal statements about appropriate and inappropriate words are difficult if not impossible. For many, the word "lady"; is associated with all sorts of social baggage and is a narrow definition implying more about class, stereotyping and inhibiting assumptions than anything remotely compatible with modern professional sport. Yet these outdated labels persist, symptomatic of the immensely strong influences which continue to insidiously inhibit and devalue female participation and achievement. Consider media influence, youth culture, peer pressure and general uncertainty regarding changing social roles for girls and women. Also consider the recent debate in the British Boxing Board of Control as to whether boxing is damaging to women's femininity and reproduction.


If this is the stark reality in the background culture as expressed in the vast majority of media coverage of both sport and female lifestyles, the impact on the development of female sport as a whole and on individual girls and women must be incalculable.

We must never forget that athletics has played a powerfully positive role in combating gender stereo-typing and presenting positive images of strong, talented, female high achievers to the public. Coaching has played a vital role in this. From approximately the early 1960s onwards, athletes and coaches reacted against over-protective Victorian prejudices by becoming “gender-blind” – treating all athletes as if they were the same.  There is no doubt that coaching, alongside increasingly equal and often-integrated competitive opportunities at all levels, has enabled athletics to make a huge contribution to women’s sport in Britain and the world. In comparison to other major sports, athletics can truly be proud of its contribution to the emancipation of women and girls in sport.

However, at this point in the sport’s development more is clearly required, because:

It is worth remembering that, although women athletes of the 50s, 60s, 70s were restricted to very few events, team and overall performances in those events were equal and frequently vastly superior to our men. (Fig 2.– 1960 and 64 Olympic teams,)

Figure 2 - 1960 and 1964 Olympic Teams
Event   No. of
Participants		 Final Semi-Final Quater-Final Heat
100m (1960) Male 1   4    
Female 3 2, 3   5  
200m (1960) Male 3   4, DSQ 4, 5  
Female 3 3 5   4
800m (1960) Male 3     4, 5 4
Female 3 6     5, 6
Sprint Hurdles (1960) Male 3     5, 5, 6  
Female 2 2     3
4 x 100m (1960) Male   3      
Female   DSQ      
100m (1964) Male 3     5 6, 6
Female 3 8 6   6
200m (1964) Male 2        
Female 3 7, 8 5 6, 6  
400m (1964) Male 3 4, 6 4, 4    
Female 3 2 6    
800m (1964) Male 3   4, 4    
Female 3 1, 8 6   5
Sprint Hurdles (1964) Male 2   8   4
Female 1   5    
4 x 100m (1964) Male     8      
Female    3      

Although the global expansion of the sport since then will have had some influence, it is only since about the mid-eighties, when the economic circumstances of the sport changed, that women’s athletics fell back in comparison. By the late 80s and early 90s there was ample evidence, both statistical (performance) and anecdotal, to suggest that elite women’s athletics was suffering from low morale and stagnating levels of performance. (See fig 3 Olympic and World Top 8 placings 1948 to 2005).

The uneven playing field created by east European drug regimes in that period, together with the seemingly eternal media bias towards male sport, were clearly significant parts of this negative cycle. With the introduction of lottery funding, commercially driven imbalance has evened out, as shown by an increase of 10% in the proportion of female athletes eligible for World Class Performance in the period 2000 to 2005. However, there has also been a catastrophic decline in standards of male achievement in the same and subsequent period. This is due to many non-gender specific factors, but the effect on female achievement appears to have been mitigated to some extent by the advantages of equal access to support services afforded by lottery funding. This obviously does NOT imply that gender is adequately taken account of in the athlete development pathway. Simple observation shows that it is not and that, therefore, the expression of full female athletic potential in Britian is still a long way off.

As a simple example, Windsor, Slough and Eton Teenage Dropout Project (see below) documents the transition from girlhood towards womanhood that too often flags the end of competitive athletics.   Whilst many observers may have noted these factors, WSE’s contribution is to purposefully observe and question, then structure the findings  in such a way as to place the ball firmly at the feet of coaching and clubs. An athlete centred approach  dictates that the sport’s task is to take  the pressures of modern life into consideration, not to sit back and wait for athletes who do not succumb.

Windsor, Slough and Eton Teenage Dropout Project

Based on observations and recordings over several years

So, what happens?

Exam Time

Social life, boyfriends and money

Approaching the U20 age group

Plus... body and emotional changes
= Under pressure - pulled every which way - unprepared

WHERE DO WE GO WRONG AND WHAT CAN WE DO?

Irene Speller, Windsor, Slough and Eton AC

NEXT: An athlete centered approach