The female leaders driving change in rowing

The world of sports administration is one which broadly remains dominated by men. A report for the International Olympic Committee in 2021 said only three international sports federations were led by women and nine had female secretaries-general.

In rowing, a handful of national federations have women at the top of their leadership. World Rowing launched the WIL – Women in Leadership programme in October 2023, aimed at empowering women in rowing administration, management, and governance, but there remains a long way to go before there is gender equality within the sport.

For International Women’s Day 2025 (8 March), three of the sport’s top female leaders spoke to World Rowing about their experiences – Rowing Australia and Rowing Ireland chief executive officers (CEOs) Sarah Cook and Michelle Carpenter, and British Rowing director of performance Louise Kingsley.

Although all three are now at the top of the decision-making structures within their federations, driving rowing in their countries onwards, none of Cook, Carpenter and Kingsley had originally planned to go into sports administration specifically.

Carpenter, a rower since her teens, was originally a physical education teacher, but became involved in driving forward participation in sport through roles as a women in sports manager and then the leader of Ireland’s ‘Get Going… Get Rowing’ programme which continues to encourage schoolchildren on to ergos. She was appointed as Rowing Ireland’s CEO in 2018.

Two-time Olympian Cook started coaching after her retirement from competitive rowing but soon got into sports leadership, taking on a variety of positions before becoming a board member at Rowing Australia. In 2022 she was appointed the federation’s chief operating officer and in June 2023, CEO.

Kingsley was a successful rowing coach but had decided to step away from coaching for lifestyle reasons when in 2001 David Tanner, the then-performance director at British Rowing, offered her the opportunity of running the new World Class Start programme. Kingsley progressed through various roles including Paralympic team leader, before being appointed to her current position in 2021.

Find the support you need

“Having allies, but particularly male allies, was particularly important, and people who identified a skillset or a capability in me that would suggest the next step,” says Cook of her career progression.

Support was key for Carpenter too as she made the steps up. She credits in particular a women in rowing leadership course run by World Rowing that she attended in 2017, saying she came back as a “different person”, giving her the confidence that she could apply for more senior roles.

“You’ve got this classic piece that if a woman is looking at a job description they won’t go for it because they don’t hit all the criteria. Courses like that and support in leadership and influence and encouragement is really important,” Carpenter adds.

“Many females are not as naturally or deeply confident as some of their male peers. That will play out sometimes in how people show up or what they should apply for,” agrees Kingsley.

Kingsley says those working in high-performance roles need to look at encouraging others into positions they might not think of going for. She adds that starting out as a coach, as many sports administrators do, can equip you well for the challenges of the position.

“It’s about thinking laterally and creating opportunities,” she says. “Historically, if you had a female coach who wanted to have a family you tended to lose them.

“Any time we are advertising we will always try to interview at least one female for any role that we have. Part of it is us understanding what support may actually be needed by people within our sport. Unless we understand where an individual’s gaps lie it’s very hard for us to do anything about it,” Kingsley explains, adding that she carries out detailed debriefs with candidates to help understand the challenges.

“It’s a tricky one because it’s so nuanced and individual, it’s more an attitude and an approach rather than necessarily a policy or a programme,” she says.

Mentorship is also a way for women to find support or support others. Cook is an enthusiastic participant in the Minerva Network, which partners current athletes with sport and business leaders, while Carpenter says finding a sponsor and a mentor were significant steps in her career development.

“I’m really task-driven. I made a commitment to do a number of things and that drove me,” she adds. “It’s important to know that the time is never right to go for something; life can change in a blink. If you want something you just have to go for it.”

Trailblazers

The trio acknowledge that rowing compares well to many other sports when it comes to equality of opportunity, at both the sporting and administrative levels.

In the UK, Kingsley is far from the first woman to hold a senior position within British Rowing – although she is the first woman in her specific role. Before her, the likes of former British Rowing chairs Di Ellis and Annamarie Phelps, and coaches and World Rowing commission members Penny Chuter and Rosemary Mayglothling, have had significant impacts.

“As a national governing body we’re pretty good. If you’re a capable person you will do well, your gender doesn’t come into it,” Kingsley believes, pointing to what she calls a “good gender split” across the board and senior coaching team.

World Rowing has mandated that nations’ delegates to Congress must be evenly split on gender lines, and Cook says: “That’s really setting the tone from the top and that’s really important. It’s really up to the federations now to ensure that they’re doing the same within their own countries to follow World Rowing’s lead in that regard.”

Sometimes this is driven by government policy; the Australian government has now mandated that federations lacking gender equal representation on their boards will lose funding. Similarly, there is funding for Ireland around women in sport, and Rowing Ireland has targets for gender balance both in the boardroom and the sport more widely.

“It’s still hard, there’s still blockages,” admits Carpenter. “We’re still struggling with gender quotas. Even though I don’t agree with them I think you have to have them to encourage what you need.”

“What I realised along my career journey is that it’s very difficult to change things unless you’re in a position of power and influence. That was really an influence and motivator to keep driving towards this position so that I could affect change,” Cook adds.

Making the change

As CEOs of their federations, she and Carpenter are also spearheading projects specifically aimed at women. Within Rowing Australia a new parental leave policy is now in place and Cook wants to put in place a menopause policy. Separately she has been leading a women in high-performance coaching project, which has fed into a wider piece of work by the Australian Institute of Sport into how to make coaching more accessible to women.

Rowing Ireland has also been looking at areas such as coaching teenage girls, and Carpenter adds: “We’d like to do more around women in coaching and see more women coaches. That needs to be done and looked at and see what we can do differently there.”

All three female leaders agree more still can be and needs to be done to encourage, support and promote women in sports leadership, and that having women at the top table can only be a positive.

“Gender diversity is important. These things that are called soft skills which women often embody, actually soft skills deliver hard outcomes,” Cook says.

“You do get a different view of a boardroom or leadership when you have that mixed voice, mixed genders across the table. You need that diversity and equality piece. It’s not brain surgery,” Carpenter concludes.