A 10-point plan will be introduced by Premiership Women’s Rugby next season that aims to increase the number of female coaches at international level, with only one top-10 nation currently being led by a woman.
The scheme aims to create a springboard for more women at the elite tier of the sport, where there is a glaring lack of diversity among top coaches. Whitney Hansen is in charge of New Zealand, but, Jo Yapp and Gaëlle Mignot stood down from their positions after last year’s Rugby World Cup, with the Wallaroos and France respectively.
At the groundbreaking 2025 tournament there were three female head coaches, but there are none in the 2026 Women’s Six Nations. At PWR clubs all the head coaches are men, and of the 22 women coaching in the league, just six hold senior roles.
“There is a huge amount of work to do to change everything from perception, experience and pipeline of female coaches,” Genevieve Shore, the PWR chair, said. “Every single piece from ‘I have done my coaching qualification’ to ‘I have got my job’ needs intervention. That is the work we are doing.”
While enforcing a minimum operating standard on the number of female coaches at each club is being considered, providing financial investment to bring women into coaching and offering them training and development is also part of the plan.
The league commissioned research with the Rugby Football Union – interviewing coaches and club owners from the women’s and men’s game – and came up with a 100-page report on diversifying coaching in the women’s game.
Susie Appleby, the former Exeter Women’s head coach, said: “The support you need is immense. It is quite solitary at times. You get quite isolated, not necessarily by choice. You end up doing everything yourself because that is what you have always done rather than reaching out for support.”
Shore added the hope is that more female coaches at league level will translate to the international stage. There are some female coaches in the Six Nations setups, such as Sarah Hunter and Emily Scarratt with England, but male coaches are the significant majority.
One major part of having more female coaches into international rugby is getting their foot in the door. Loughborough Lightning’s assistant coach, Rachel Taylor, has praised World Rugby for its internship programmes that give women more experience and she believes coaches’ home unions have a big role to play. “You have to get the right coach for the right job,” she said.
“Just because you are an ex-Welsh player doesn’t mean you should go on and coach with Wales, but it is a really good avenue to get in. If you think of Lou Meadows, she had a really good experience with the Red Roses in terms of coaching exposure and now has that opportunity to go into another union [with the USA]. It is difficult if you don’t have your home union championing you from the off.”
With a limited number of women in coaching roles it means others cannot see it as a clear career path, says the Wales under-18s head coach, Siwan Lillicrap. “You have to see it to want to be it,” she said. “We have been there in a playing sense, but there are not enough women coaches out there for people to aspire or think there is a path.
“The roadmap isn’t clear so therefore people aren’t getting out there. Even if you aren’t a pro player, there are people out there who will be good coaches. Do they see that career roadmap? They probably don’t.”
The perception of what a head coach looks like also needs to change, according to the former Ireland player Anna Caplice, who has coached Laos. She said: “I have this theory that if you said ‘that is the new coach’ and you turned around and it was a man with his hands in his pockets there would be absolutely no question about his ability.
“Whereas if you turned around and saw a woman who had everything ready and knows her stuff, immediately there are question over what you do until you deliver it. Even after you have delivered it, there can still be question over it. That is a societal thing we have to battle with every day, in many areas of life, not just rugby.”
The initial development of female coaches is lacking too, according to many in the game. Different voices had different ideas of how that would be fostered: Caplice wants to see more player-coach roles, the Wales development coach, Elinor Snowsill, suggests unions introducing paid guest coaching periods in international camps, while Taylor puts forward female coaches being mandated at all levels of the game. World Rugby have said they are not planning to introduce an enforced number of female coaches.
Another factor on why there are fewer female coaches is because of the slower recent professionalisation of women’s rugby. Snowsill said: “If you look 10 years ago the game was still amateur. There were no full-time players so they all had full-time jobs alongside that. For them to retire and say ‘I am going to cancel my career as well and go into coaching’ was a lot less likely.
“There were also no paid roles within the female game. There was nothing for them to go into anyway. That is why we have a generation of missing coaches.”
Shore added: “Lots of men when they are in academies and are professional rugby players take this pathway and go through coaching qualifications. They get opportunities to coach, get their 10,000 hours in; 95% of our women have a job as well as playing. They do not have another 20 hours a week to coach.”
It has been suggested female coaches can bring empathetic communication styles, as well as a deeper understanding of female biology, particularly the effect of the menstrual cycle on athletes, to coaching roles. Preparing players for difficult environments is another area female coaches who have played the game can do well.
Snowsill said: “I have had conversations about how do we prepare these players to be able to mentally and psychologically be strong enough and know how to challenge environments, know if they ever find themselves in environments that are not right or are not healthy,. How do they, as a playing group, challenge it?
“We have found, as players, it took a toll on us and we weren’t well equipped or well supported. So we are massively motivated to make sure the next generation has those other skills. Whereas would [our male equivalents] ever think that is needed? Because they may never have felt like that in an environment. Without women in these positions or environments we aren’t getting that development as well.”
