US women's soccer coach Jill Ellis has won a World Cup but can't get a job coaching men
As a schoolgirl growing up in southern England, Jill Ellis couldn't play competitive soccer. It wasn't that girls weren't allowed. It was just that, given the attitudes of the 1970s, no one had thought to organize teams for them.
It wasn't ladylike, Ellis' mother, Margaret, once explained.
That changed when Ellis moved with her family to Virginia as a teenager, where she not only joined her high school's team but led it to a state title.
The victory was just a partial one, though, because, decades later, Ellis is still hemmed in by societal norms. Although she is one of the most decorated coaches of one of the most successful teams in soccer history, her way forward remains limited not by her talent but by her gender.
What money, fame and prestige there are in coaching exist primarily on the men's side. Yet that remains exclusively a boys' club where sex, not success, determines admission. While men routinely coach women in every sport on every level, the number
