Coaches of high school sports teams around the country are implementing a pair of programs that are embedded with gender bias, prejudice, and unequal regard for women and men.
The Athletes as Leaders and Coaching Boys Into Men curriculums are products of San Francisco based nonprofit Futures Without Violence, whose mission is to “end violence against women and children around the world.” Feminist ideology is baked into both of these programs, which are being implemented in high schools around Washington state. Our schools should play no part in imbuing young minds with such gender bias.
In our previous post “Coaching Boys Into Men curriculum has major blind spot,” we laid out how CBIM focuses on boys as potential abusers and neglects to teach boys to recognize and prevent abuse against themselves — among other flaws in that program. In this post, we explain how the bias, prejudice, and inequality found in Coaching Boys Into Men is similarly found in the Athletes as Leaders program for high school girls, most egregiously with their “Oppression Chart”.
“Oppression Chart” says men are advantaged
In a lesson titled Understanding Privilege and Oppression, Athletes as Leaders provides an “Oppression Chart” that frames women as oppressed and men as oppressors. The curriculum says women are “given less power and access” and cisgender men are “given more power and access.” This is sexist dogma. It is foolish for two reasons:
- We should be teaching young people to view everyone as an individual, rather than to assume things about people based on their sex or gender.
- There is a complex mix of advantages and disadvantages correlated with being male or female in present day America.
Notice the wording of the statement above the chart:
Oppression = one group is given more power and access, and other groups are given less power and access.
The writers of the program single out “one group” as advantaged and “other groups” as disadvantaged. This is divisive stereotyping. We should not be teaching our youth to see their fellow human beings through an in-group/out-group lens. Also, is it in any way constructive to teach our female youth that women inherently face “more barriers and disadvantages”?
What is the purpose of Athletes as Leaders?
The Athletes as Leaders program is ambiguous about what its purpose and objectives are. Its name suggests it is about leadership. That is consistent with the tweet below, in which the Federal Way Public School District shows photos of parents learning about Athletes as Leaders and Coaching Boys Into Men. It says the programs “offer leadership skills.”
Middle and high school parents attended an information session about our new programs, #AthletesAsLeaders and #CoachingBoysintoMen. These programs offer leadership skills for HS scholar athletes. Read more here: https://t.co/VunfDIGKUK #Goal2 pic.twitter.com/xaArcE3v0W
— FWPS210 (@FWPS210) September 10, 2019
Page 1 of the Athletes as Leaders curriculum says it “aims to empower youth to take an active role in challenging stereotypes, promoting healthy relationships and creating a safe and welcoming community for all.” The sentence after that says, “AAL is based on research and best practices in the field of sexual assault prevention.” Team Up Washington, which exists to promote the implementation of AAL and CBIM, calls them “violence prevention programs for high school athletes.”
Is the Athletes as Leaders program really about leadership? Or challenging stereotypes? Or creating a welcoming community? Or preventing sexual assault? Or preventing violence? The answer is: It’s not about any of those things, precisely. This is obvious when one realizes that both AAL and CBIM actually reinforce certain stereotypes, create an unwelcoming community for boys, and focus on preventing sexual assault and relationship violence only against women and girls.
In our post focused on Coaching Boys Into Men, we discuss how that program is similarly ambiguous about its purpose and objectives.
Check your hypocrisy
The writers of the Athletes as Leaders curriculum follow up the lesson on Understanding Privilege and Oppression with a lesson on Challenging Harmful Stereotypes – with no apparent awareness of their hypocrisy. Here are the main points of the lesson (quoted from session 3, page 1):
1. Many people have learned harmful stereotypes and labels about specific groups of people that they need to “unlearn.”
2. We can help create a community that is safe and welcoming for all people, including all gender and racial identities.
Let us stop and consider:
- Are the girls in the program now expected to unlearn what the prior lesson taught them: to stereotype their male peers as advantaged and themselves as disadvantaged?
- When teaching girls that cisgender male students, teachers, and staff in their school are, by default, “given more power and access” compared to them, is that conducive for “creating a community that is safe and welcoming” for males?
In a lesson on Addressing Misinformation and Bias, a discussion prompt says: “Imagine a person says something hurtful that seems to be based on misinformation about a specific group. What are some ways to help them recognize it?”
Here is one hurtful thing a girl could say to a guy at her school that is based on misinformation about a specific group: “Men are privileged oppressors.” A way to help them recognize it would be to tell them: “We need to unlearn the prejudice we’ve been taught that frames men monolithically as advantaged compared to women.”
Boys and girls equally deserve respect
We reviewed every page of the Athletes as Leaders curriculum for high school girls and the Coaching Boys Into Men curriculum for high school boys. We previously wrote about CBIM’s bias in our post “Coaching Boys Into Men curriculum has major blind spot“.
Coaching Boys Into Men is essentially about teaching boys to respect women and girls and to not be violent toward them, as is evident from the use of the words “women and girls” dozens of times in the CBIM Coaches Kit documents.
The virtues that CBIM promotes include:
- denouncing violence against women and girls
- preventing violence against women and girls
- showing respect towards women and girls
- treating women and girls as equals
- treating women and girls with honor
- refusing to use language that degrades women and girls
- refusing to engage in lewd or foul behavior toward women and girls
- listening and believing the experiences of women and girls
- cooperating with women and girls to promote gender equity
Athletes as Leaders, in contrast, is completely silent regarding girls’ conduct with boys. It never once instructs girls to respect men and boys and to not be violent toward them. This is despite CDC surveys showing approximately 1 in 11 female and 1 in 14 male high school students having experienced physical dating violence in the previous year, and 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men having experienced violence from an intimate partner.
Honor women? Honor men?
Those who are behind the Athletes as Leaders curriculum might find highly objectionable the notion of instructing girls to “honor” men and boys. Yet, that is what genuine gender equality would look like, given CBIM’s guidance to boys to “treat women and girls with honor and respect.” It is as if the curriculum’s writers are wearing blinders that do not allow them to see the prevalence of disrespect toward and violence against males by females. Or they aware of it, but they deem it less objectionable.
Taken together, the Coaching Boys Into Men and Athletes as Leaders programs represent biased, backward-looking, outdated views of gender relations in America. Curriculums suited for the modern era treat boys, girls, men, and women with equality and neutrality.
Who is behind the Athletes as Leaders program?
University of Washington Medicine’s Harborview Abuse and Trauma Center created the original version of the Athletes as Leaders curriculum in 2015. Their collaborators included staff from the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and Futures Without Violence (the nonprofit behind Coaching Boys Into Men), plus students at Seattle’s Garfield High School.
The reviewers of the 2021 version of the Athletes as Leaders curriculum include staff from the organizations mentioned above, plus Seattle Public Schools and Lifewire, a Bellevue-based nonprofit.
Funding that supported the development of Athletes as Leaders came from:
- The Washington State Department of Commerce, Office of Crime Victims Advocacy
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
- The National Football League (NFL)
Team Up Washington exists to promote the use of Coaching Boys into Men and Athletes as Leaders in high schools around the state. Team Up Washington’s sponsors are the City of Seattle, the Seattle Seahawks, the Seattle Mariners, 710 KIRO, and Legal Hope (formerly The WAVE Foundation). Supporters of Team Up Washington include Seattle Children’s Hospital, the Seattle Storm, and OL Reign (formerly Seattle Reign FC).
Signs of nuance
Some lessons in the Athletes as Leaders program contain no gender bias. For example, the lesson on Fostering Healthy Relationships says, “Everyone has the right to feel safe and be treated with respect in all relationships.” Despite the program’s overall gender bias, there are moments when the curriculum demonstrates nuance regarding gender relations. For example:
- “We recognize that we ALL have some privileges. And we all have faced challenges too.” (session 2, page 1) Notice, however, that they stop short of saying that everyone experiences some privileges and some oppression. Instead it’s “we all have faced challenges,” which is a way of preserving the ‘oppressed’ label for females.
- “Although certain populations experience sexual assault at higher rates than others, it’s important to know that anyone can be assaulted, including men and boys.” (session 7, page 3) It’s a good acknowledgement, but neither Athletes as Leaders nor Coaching Boys Into Men takes this seriously enough to apply it to helping boys. For example, both programs could have a lesson specifically on males’ experience of sexual assault and intimate partner violence.
- “What could you do to help a friend who is treating someone else badly or abusing their partner?” (session 8, page 4) This hints at the possibility that one of the girls’ peers, including their female peers, could be abusing their dating partner.
What do they mean by “gender equity”?
“Gender equity” is among the six ‘core principles’ of the Athletes as Leaders program. Nowhere do the curriculum’s writers define that term. It is likely, judging by AAL’s “Oppression Chart,” that their version of gender equity is unconcerned with the many inequities impacting boys and men. To them, progress toward gender equity is interchangeable with progress for women and girls.
Get involved, make a difference
To anyone with connections to a school where coaches are implementing Athletes as Leaders or Coaching Boys Into Men, we recommend getting involved by inviting the coaches to either:
- Be transparent about the gender bias embedded in the curriculums and offer supplemental information to compensate for the bias, or
- Discontinue using the curriculums.
Schools should find programs that teach teens healthy relationship behaviors without stereotyping boys or girls as abusers, victims, oppressors, or oppressed.