My Genius Hour Reflection 1

This week for my genius hour I began by "googling" my question, and to my surprise there were a lot of pages of links relevant to my topic. I know I should not have been surprised, but I was. There were many coaches and people who were interested in discovering what the differences were between coaching male and female athletes. Some of the sources I looked at were blog posts, scientific studies, as well as psychology papers. Some of the things I have learned so far are some of the ways females and males differ in terms of communication, confidence, criticism, and competition. Many of the sources that I have looked at state that they do not wish to make stereotypes, but instead give assumptions and conclusions based on their own experiences as a coach or part of a study. In terms of psychology, males appear to be analytical and logical when processing information. Whereas females understand concepts better when they are given a whole picture, and tend to use both sides of the brain, whereas males use one side. Communication is another key difference between males and females. Females tend to be more invested in how something is being communicated, such as tone and body language. Whereas males like any kind of praise and are likely to take criticism a little better than females. In regards to competition, males tend to be individualistic and females are more cooperative. This is believed to be true because females tend to worry about what their peers think of them, whereas males are more concerned with their individual success (alpha male idea).

One factor of trouble is do I take into account the age of the athletes when looking at sources and information, or can the same results and observations be applied to all ages? From this point, I'd like to look at other types of resources such as videos, and could maybe include appropriate videos in my final presentation. As well as looking at scientific data and experiences conducted to see if they're results coincide with what I have read so far. Here are the links to two articles I plan on looking more in depth into:

https://www.womeninsport.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Female-Psychology-and-Considerations-for-Coaching-Practice.pdf?938151

http://thesportjournal.org/article/an-exploration-of-female-athletes-experiences-and-perceptions-of-male-and-female-coaches/