‘Poor thing’ or ‘Wow, she knows how to do it’ – gender stereotypes as barriers to women’s qualification in the education of soccer coaches

This essay explores the mechanisms preventing women from undertaking coaching education in professional soccer, as well as the factors at work when women abandon such education. The focus here is the influence of gender stereotypes on the exclusion of females from coaching education and on discrimination against them during education. Systems theory provides the background of an explanatory model designed to explain in detail the impact of such stereotypes on different system levels (society, organization, interaction) and the resulting exclusion of women from coaching education. A qualitative interview study in a regional association of the German Football Association (DFB) reveals that the exclusion of women often begins before they even start coaching education.