{"id":21157,"date":"2023-11-20T12:02:21","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T12:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/?post_type=article&p=21157"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:11:05","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:11:05","slug":"why-changing-the-gendered-conditions-of-sport-can-reduce-injury-risk-in-female-athletes","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/why-changing-the-gendered-conditions-of-sport-can-reduce-injury-risk-in-female-athletes\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Changing the Gendered Conditions of Sport Can Reduce Injury Risk in Female Athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n 20 Nov 2023 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

Why Changing the Gendered Conditions of Sport Can Reduce Injury Risk in Female Athletes<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Coaching & Development<\/a>, Human Performance<\/a>, Leadership & Culture<\/a> <\/div>\n
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https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/why-changing-the-gendered-conditions-of-sport-can-reduce-injury-risk-in-female-athletes\/<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n\n\n\n\n
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The UK Sports Institute believes that if we want to improve the conditions for girls and women in sport, we need to learn from the past.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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An article brought to you by our Partners at the<\/p>\n

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By John Portch<\/h6>\n
The clinical and biological differences between male and female athletes are often discussed when it comes to injuries, but what about social and cultural considerations?<\/h6>\n

Female athletes suffer certain sports injuries more frequently than male athletes, but that should not be the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is important to consider biological differences between men and women when it comes to performance or injury outcomes, but it\u2019s only one piece of the puzzle,\u201d says Dr Victoria Downie, a performance scientist within the UK Sports Institute\u2019s [UKSI] Performance Innovation Team. She is telling the Leaders Performance Institute about elements of her team\u2019s research into female athlete injury occurrence.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started to explore how we as an institute could better understand all the factors which are impacting how women are training, competing and performing, how they feel, and their whole experience of being women in elite sport,\u201d adds Downie, who has spent time immersed in different Olympic and Paralympic sports in order to better understand their challenges and opportunities. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to underestimate the impact of simply spending time listening to athletes. That goes for men and women but perhaps more for female athletes who feel historically as if they haven\u2019t had much of a voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Female athlete health and wellbeing has long been a priority for the UKSI. In February, through the prestigious British Academy Innovation Fellowships scheme, the Institute partnered with the University of Nottingham to launch a research project calling upon former UK Sport-funded female athletes who have retired within the last five years. The purpose is to interview these former athletes and explore how women\u2019s sporting environments \u2013 their social and cultural context when training and competing \u2013 influenced their experiences of both minor and major injuries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe asked women to talk about their experience of injury while doing their sport and all the factors that may have influenced that experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gendered environment<\/strong><\/p>\n

The research project is being led by Dr Stephanie Coen, an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Nottingham. \u201cYou may be wondering what a geographer has to do with this type of work, but my speciality within Geography is Health Geography,\u201d she tells the Leaders Performance Institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cBroadly, I\u2019m interested in how our environments influence our health and, within that, my interest has been around gender differences in physical activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2021, Coen published a paper with Joanne Parsons at the University of Manitoba and Sheree Bekker at the University of Bath entitled \u2018Anterior cruciate ligament injury: towards a gendered environmental approach\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy foray into sport was prompted by my previous work on how environments, like the gym, shape the gendered nature of physical activity,\u201d says Coen, who explains that her collaboration with Parsons and Bekker happened \u201cby chance\u201d. In 2017, she was approached by Parsons, a clinician, and four years later their paper with Bekker would provoke a response in the sports world \u201cthat exceeded our wildest expectations\u201d.<\/p>\n

One of the key elements of the paper was to challenge the focus on the clinical and biological in female athlete injury occurrence. \u201cThe current medical paradigm puts the focus of injury within the female body \u2013 menstrual cycles, anatomy, biomechanics, all of those things \u2013 whereas the gendered environmental approach asks us to take a wider lens. It\u2019s not that the biological lens doesn\u2019t matter, but the gendered environment approach asks us to think beyond the individual body to how we can change the gendered conditions of sport in ways that might reduce injury risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

The myth of the \u2018ideal female athlete\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Female athlete ACL injuries provide an illustrative example of the impact of the gendered environment. Downie says: \u201cWhen this is discussed in the media, there is talk about women having more ACL injuries because of their biomechanics, because whilst they\u2019ve got their period, their muscles are a bit more relaxed.\u201d She is not dismissive of those factors, but the UKSI has long sought to look beyond such internal factors.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne example that\u2019s come out of our work is that women in sport often talk about feeling as if they need to show they are strong or not complaining,\u201d says Downie. \u201cThat is a factor that could be leading women to not report that they are feeling a niggle or they feel that they need to train through the niggle to show they are strong \u2013 \u2018I don\u2019t want to be the one that misses training today\u2019 \u2013 and it could be a factor that delays their diagnosis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis inherent belief is embedded in history. For example, women were only allowed to run the Olympic marathon for the first time in 1984. Before that, people thought women weren\u2019t strong enough, weren\u2019t brave enough. There has been a huge shift in these beliefs over the last 40 years, but it is not a long time in the grand scheme of things. These beliefs are still in play and through this work we are hoping to highlight these factors.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is also the challenge presented by what Coen and Downie call the perception of the \u201cideal female athlete.\u201d \u201cThis is the kind of wider social norm that prescribes the social and physical qualities that the \u2018ideal\u2019 female athlete embodies,\u201d says Coen. \u201cThat might seem abstract, but actually, in the women\u2019s experiences, this kind of ideal really did function as a barrier to women feeling as if they could voice health and injury concerns because if they maybe asked too many questions, maybe they\u2019re being too direct or too assertive and that might contravene the ideal of being soft, nice, polite and agreeable. The ideal of the female athlete can have quite a tangible material impact on the everyday experiences of women athletes with ramifications for how they went about tending health and injury concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n

The drive to better understand these concerns fuels the entire project. \u201cIt\u2019s about understanding that these sorts of social norms and taken-for-granted ways of doing things become part and parcel of the sport environment,\u201d adds Coen. \u201cThese social and cultural aspects are an untapped opportunity for reducing women\u2019s injury risk. If we can make them visible, we can change them. And this puts us in a position to improve outcomes more widely for girls and women in sport.\u201d<\/p>\n

The research-to-practice gap<\/strong><\/p>\n

Coen\u2019s academic work made her a natural fit for the UKSI. \u201cWe always look outside the Institute for people who are working outside of elite sport on areas that interest us,\u201d says Downie. \u201cWe put together an application for a British Academy Innovation Fellowship and we won the award, which meant that we have Steph for the whole year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coen has taken on the duties of interviewing the retired athletes who were encouraged to come forward for the project. \u201cI feel so lucky and privileged to have this opportunity,\u201d she says. \u201cI went to my first Performance Innovation Team meeting in the spring and I\u2019ve been blown away by the creativity and excitement in the room.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we published the gendered environmental approach to ACL injury it was a conceptual paper, an idea. By partnering with the UKSI and Vic we\u2019ve been able to move this idea into something that can have a tangible impact for women in sport. That research-to-practice gap is something that often feels very wide in academia and I feel like in this work we\u2019re actually closing this gap in real time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt shows there\u2019s leadership at the UKSI that\u2019s really trying to push forward in a substantial way for female athletes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Downie\u2019s excitement is palpable with a Summer Olympics and Paralympics year approaching. \u201cThis work has not happened overnight,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re in a place now where we can share this and start to have some impact. Paris is less than a year away but we can see some tangible impact going into the next cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n

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