Sitting in front of the Olympic swim heats this week, my husband observed, “Can you believe how few female swim coaches there are?” I guess it’s a good sign that he noticed… but then he wondered: “maybe the male style​ of coaching is better at that elite level?” He may have felt my body temperature rising.

“Are you serious?” I asked. He seemed to be genuinely wanting to talk about it, so I tried to control my anger. Or whatever the feeling is that rises up inside when you confront ignorance around systemic sexism or male privilege or gender deafness. “It’s obviously a boys club,” I fumed. “It’s unconscious bias. Or perhaps it’s even more blatant than that. Men are not better at training elite athletes. You know that, right? This is about opportunity.” 

Disclaimer: I know nothing about elite sports coaching, but I know hiring bias when I see it. “Of course, I know that. Everyone benefits on every level when there is gender equality,” he said. And I know he knows it, because he has worked on this very thing within his own business. We talk about it a lot. And yet… the question hung between us. 

For a few years now, I’ve been making a concerted effort to talk more to my male friends about gender issues/equality/equity. I can tell you, it does not make you the most fun person at the dinner party. But given that my male friends are 25 years into their careers like me, and since none have had to step off career tracks for young families like myself and many of my female friends, I want to know what they think. I want to know if flexible work and gender quotas and equal pay figure into their thinking. These are people on the cusp of being industry leaders. They are going to influence culture and anoint the rising stars within their own businesses. 

Still, despite seeing how tough it is for their partners to juggle careers and family, none seem to feel much responsibility for shifting culture and making it easier to juggle family and work. In fact, many don’t have much of an opinion about it. One friend asked: “is there even a gender pay gap anymore?”

These are only a few data points. Still, it’s thought-provoking and hard to shake. In part, I think there is an assumption that men with daughters and working partners will wake up to the inequities that exist for us. But it’s simply not true. Wanting good things for the people in your life does not mean you will take on these issues and affect change in a larger sense. And it doesn’t help that when women work, we continue to shoulder the bulk of the domestic duties, valuing our partner’s time more than their own (read Fair Play for a fantastic explanation of this on a global scale and a vision for solving the problem). I am guilty of finding it easier to just do things myself, rather than argue about the rubbish, or the groceries, or the bedtime routine. Eye rolls are draining. 

Of course I did a deep dive on the stats in sports training, just in case the swim team was an outlier. It’s not. Former Sport Australia boss Kate Palmer has described high-performance sports as a “boys club” that systemically excludes women from senior coaching positions — and it’s to the detriment of male and female athletes. At the Rio Olympics, only 15 of the 160 Australian Olympic team coaches were women. She says that for a long time various sports focused on fixing the women—the idea being that they needed mentoring and programs to get up. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t work if the people who hold power within the system don’t then give them the high-performance coaching jobs.  

In her words: “To break into that boys club is really hard. There is no space for you, the environment is not great and if you want to have a life or a family it is even harder.” This same theme runs through many industries. The lines have been drawn by , and they just don’t seem to be budging. 

On the same day that I watched the swim heats with my husband, I read a column by journalist and author Julia Beard that made me feel a bit better. She wrote 'Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians' 17 years ago, but it has been revised and republished this week due to its relevance today. In the piece, she wrote about watching her teenage daughters march this year alongside hordes of women and some men; and reflected on how issues around discrimination and contempt for women in power are slowly being dragged into the mainstream. She believes we are witnessing a tipping point, where women are able to speak more freely.     

Perhaps this is our sink or swim moment. For me, it needs to start on the home front.