Assessing gender essentialist beliefs towards youth athletes: Development and preliminary validation of the Gender Essentialist Beliefs Towards Girls in Sport Scale (GEGS).

This article focuses on the development and validation of the Gender Essentialist Beliefs Towards Girls in Sport Scale (GEGS), a tool designed to measure gender essentialist beliefs among sport coaches. Gender essentialism refers to the belief in fixed, binary, and hierarchical gender differences that often devalue girls' and women's sports participation and experiences. The 20-item GEGS demonstrated strong reliability and validity through expert review, coach interviews, and statistical analyses involving 633 coaches across various sports. Findings showed that male coaches and those without prior gender training scored higher on gender essentialism, and the scale also included items related to transgender athlete inclusion, revealing associations between essentialist beliefs and anti-trans attitudes. The GEGS offers a novel, sport-specific measure to identify and address gender biases in coaching, with implications for improving coach education and fostering more equitable sport environments for girls and all athletes.