To celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, and Gender Equality Month, the Olympic Federation of Ireland has today announced a series of profiles of some of Ireland’s high-performance female coaches, who have been blazing a trail in Irish Olympic sport. The series kicked off with interviews with two well-known names in Irish sport, Lisa Jacob (Hockey Ireland Performance Director) and Noelle Morrissey (Athletics Ireland Olympic Coach).
Whilst the Olympic movement is increasingly moving towards gender parity across many arenas, from the athletes on the field of play to the constitution of boards and committees, there exists a significant imbalance in high-performance coaching. In Tokyo 2020 only 8% of coaches representing Team Ireland at the Games were female. This is a statistic that is echoed across the world; 10% of the coaches overall accredited at the Winter Olympics in Beijing were female, and 13% of the coaches at the Summer Olympics were women.
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