Male domination of Australia's Olympic coaching ranks has been slammed just days after the wild celebration of swimming coach Dean Boxall was condemned as an act of 'toxic masculinity'.
Writing for women's careers website Allbright, journalist Brooke Le Poer Trench recalled a conversation with her husband after he wondered why there were so few Australian female swimming coaches at the Tokyo Olympics.
'Maybe the male style of coaching is better at that elite level?' Le Poer Trench said her husband asked.
She then described her reaction to the comment as fuming.
'It's obviously a boys club,' she wrote. '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.'
In the opinion article, Le Poer Trench quoted former Australian Sports Commission boss Kate Palmer who also called high-performance sports in Australia 'a boys' club that systemically excludes women from senior coaching positions'.
Dean Boxall (left), Ariarne Titmus' Olympic swimming coach, had drawn criticism for 'toxic masculinity' as the debate continues over the lack of high-performance female coaches in Australian sport
Ian Thorpe's coach Tracey Menzies (left), pictured in 2002, was one of the last females to coach a swimmer at Olympic level
At the Rio Olympics only nine per cent of accredited high performance coaches were female, which fell from 12 per cent at the previous Games in London 2012. This was despite there being more female athletes on the team than male at the Rio Olympics.
'The ASC and sports must now address a glaring issue which is the low number, and a declining trend, of elite female coaches in high
