Kate Palmer says Australian high-performance sports system a broken ‘boys’ club

Kate Palmer, the former Chief Executive of the Australian Sports Commission, has described the nation’s high-performance sports system as a “boys’ club” that systemically excludes women from senior coaching positions to the detriment of both male and female athletes.

In an article published yesterday in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Palmer, the only woman to lead Australia’s Federal Government sports agency since its creation 36 years ago, said allegations being aired against swimming administrators - sexism, misogyny and the belittling and fat-shaming of athletes - were symptomatic of a bigger problem Australian sport had failed to address.

Palmer, now the Chief Executive at OneAthletics, made her comments following claims made by Olympic swimmer, Madeline Groves who, quitting the Tokyo Olympic trials cited "misogynistic perverts" in the sport.

With Swimming Australia set to launching an all-female independent review to investigate the concerns, Palmer says the cultural problems in swimming are endemic across Australia’s sports system.

Citing the Rio Olympics, where only 15 of 160 Australian Olympic team coaches were women, Palmer identified under-representation of women in senior coaching roles as a “glaring issue” across all sports.

She conceded that in the five years since, little had changed, noting “for a long time we have focused on fixing the women, the idea that they need mentoring, courses, a program

“At the end of the day, the system is broken (and) this is not new … it has been like this since the early days of the AIS (Australian Institute of Sport) when the organisation was run by men mainly for men and women were treated as second class. There is more to come in all this, I think.”

Palmer also cited male dominance in high-performance sport in Australia, with cultural barriers in place to stop women from reaching administrative and coaching leadership positions.

She noted “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.

“There is not a cohesive strategy in this country for changing women’s participation in leadership in sport.

Palmer said the priority given to high-performance outcomes - Olympic and world championship medals by both the AIS and the sports it funds - created a myopic sporting system unable to see, much less properly address, the cultural barriers to women reaching leadership positions in both administration and coaching.

She described the AIS, which allocates high-performance funding to sports, as an “organisation which is itself male-dominated, especially in the high-performance area, and quite misogynistic”.

Looking back on her time at the Australian Sports Commission, Palmer recalled “I found it extraordinarily frustrating the way women have to survive in that system.”

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