E a ea e a ea de a d g a e d e
LET’S start with a primary school classroom. Former Ireland international Tania Rosser can easily tell which copy belongs to a girl and which copy belongs to a boy in her job with the support teaching team in St Brigid’s Primary School, Dublin. “Girls are very neat. They like to be perfect and please the teacher,” Rosser says. “Whereas boys will just get down the ideas, they’ll get the work in. But the girls want it perfect and that’s from a very young age. And it carries on to the sportsfield as well.”
Trying to understand the differences between girls and boys, and women and men, comes with the obvious disclaimer that there are generalisations involved and everyone is different. But what can sometimes get bypassed in the effort to treat every boy and girl in sport the same is the appreciation that girls and boys can respond differently to things.
If, as Rosser points out, some girls from an early age want to be perfect and please the teacher, how does that mindset manifest itself when they play sport?
In T e Fe a e B a , neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine wrote: “More than 99pc of male and female genetic coding is exactly the same. But that percentage difference influences every single cell in our bodies – from the nerves that register pleasure and pain to the neurons that transmit perceptions, thoughts, feelings and emotions”.
Sports Coach UK and the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation produced a series of fact sheets aimed at coaches who coach women.
The ‘Female Psychology and Considerations for Coaching Practice’ section makes references to the book ‘Inside Her Pretty Little Head’ which describes six main areas in which academic research has shown men and women to be different.
One area of difference is ‘base reaction’ – to which men respond with ‘action’ while for women it’s ‘feeling’. For ‘innate interest’, for men it’s ‘things’, for women it’s ‘people’.
Under the heading ‘survival strategy’, for men it’s ‘through self-interest, hierarchy, power and competition’ while for women, it’s ‘through relationships, empathy and connections’.
Rosser (pictured, right) became the first female in Ireland to coach a male rugby team when she took over as head coach of the Clontarf second team and she also works with the senior men’s team.
Has she noticed obvious differences in the mindset of male and female players?
“Yeah, definitely. I think female athletes are more emotionally involved.
“When something goes wrong, sometimes, they take it on emotionally whereas guys would tend to let it go a lot easier.
“Females have heightened emotions, I think, more so than males. What I find from coaching is that males don’t take it personally.”
Cork women’s Gaelic football manager Ephie Fitzgerald has coached women and men. He thinks mistakes made on the pitch linger with female players.
“It maybe festers with them internally and they can lose confidence quite easily, maybe, at times,” Fitzgerald says.
“I think, in general, most girls would back their way through but they would be still very het up about it afterwards that they made a silly mistake.
“I don’t think it impacts that much on their performance on the day. It would be something that would be in the memory bank and it could come out in training or if you were doing analysis. And a lot of the girls we have would be some of the toughest people I’ve ever come across – they would be very committed.
“I don’t know is it a kind of a comfort thing that they, women, just don’t like praise! Now they do like affirmation, (but) they’re very self-critical, I find often. Whereas with fellas if you say they had a good game they’d be: ‘Yeah, yeah I did’.”
Why are female players so hard on themselves?
“I think coming from the base that they’re coming from in terms of what they had – facilities wise and all the rest – they had very little, so everything’s a bonus.
All of that feeds into ‘ah sure, we’re only