About a year and a half ago I decided to step down from competitive rowing, while remaining connected to the sport through coaching. Since then I've been volunteering as a coach of our novice women's squad, a task which has been time-consuming but immensely rewarding. I'm thoroughly enjoying meeting a new group of women each year and helping them develop into rowers.

One of the reasons I wanted to coach was that I feel quite strongly there aren't enough women's coaches around. I found a statistic here from 2012 which suggests 30 per cent of all coaches in the UK are female, dropping to 18 per cent of qualified coaches. I imagine this will skew heavily by sport, with more women coaching sports attracting more female participation such as equestrian, netball and gymnastics.

In rowing men definitely outnumber the women. In 17 years of competitive rowing I've had four female coaches and at our club currently there are four of us, including our junior head coach. To put that into context I think there are at least eight men coaching right now for us, including our three professional senior coaches.

During my swimming years I had a few female coaches, most notably the remarkable Pat who coached younger swimmers alongside her husband Adam. She's pretty much retired from coaching now but can still be found in the lanes of York's pools! I seem to remember a roughly equal number of male and female coaches at swimming when I was a teenager and looking at my club's website now the majority of their coaches are women - apart from the head coach.

Pat in swimming, and more recently Pauline at rowing, have both been big influences on me. They've devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to the sports they love over many years and show that you can succeed in sport regardless of age and gender.

A straw poll of friends on social media suggests that some sports have plenty of female coaches. Equestrian, gymnastics, netball and lacrosse seem to come out well and most of my female friends had had female coaches in several sports over their careers.

Other sports fare less well. A couple of friends are fencers, and they say women are not well-represented as coaches in fencing. Two male rowing friends only ever had one female coach across a fairly long career. A friend who has played football and golf to a serious level says she has rarely had female football coaches and never had a female golf coach.

One friend commented that "the better you got and further you progressed, the more likely you were to get a male coach", and as you go up the levels towards more elite sport the numbers of women do seem to drop off. I downloaded the Team GB media guide for Rio 2016, which says that out of 241 officials at the Olympics, 49 were women (20.3 per cent). But of those 49, only 13 had the job title 'coach' - out of 122 coaches in total. Women were more commonly in Rio with Team GB as physios, team managers, performance analysts and so on. A huge number of sports had no female coaches on the team, including athletics, and sports like rugby sevens and hockey employed men as their lead women's coaches.

Equestrian had three head coaches, including Di Lampard; Amanda Reddin headed up the women's artistic gymnastics team and Tracy Whittaker-Smith the trampoline team; and both synchro swimming coaches were female. These were the only women to hold the 'head coach' title for GB in Rio.

But the question is, does it matter? Aren't men just as able to coach a woman to success in sport as women? My most successful rowing seasons were all when I had men coaching me, and one friend who has competed at a very high level in several sports points out:

Whether I respected [my coaches] or not had nothing to do with being male or female.

Turn the question on its head, however, and you have the sort of reaction Andy Murray got when he appointed Amélie Mauresmo as his coach. He was the first tennis star to choose a woman as his coach and found himself having to defend the appointment in the media. Meanwhile swimming star Adam Peaty has been coached by former Olympic swimmer Mel Marshall since 2009. In a 2015 interview Peaty said:

With a male coach you can have a good argument I think but with a woman I think you just really negotiate.

He picked up on the fact that men and women tend to have different styles and approaches to life and therefore often different approaches to coaching. Interestingly another friend noted that she'd had a female coach when she was coxing a male rowing crew, and that the coach had taken a very laddish approach to the task. My friend thinks she might have achieved the same outcomes had she not tried to be 'one of the boys'.

Peaty and Murray have both commented on the more thoughtful, philosophical approach which women can bring to coaching and I think that's something which needs to be recognised. Women are often told to 'man up' when they're participating in sport - and I've probably used the phrase myself - but while promoting a tough, take-no-prisoners attitude to competition you have to also recognise that women bring different baggage to sport.

One of my current squad members notes:

Sport has always been something you had to 'man up' to do; male coaches have always positioned themselves as the voice of reason attempting to control a 'gaggle' of girls who just want to chat etc. subtly reinforcing gender norms in a performative environment to which young girls especially, will respond and play along.

I think you have to recognise that, for instance, women are prone to showing our emotions more; not necessarily being more emotional, but allowing those emotions to surface. I've often got emotional when selection decisions have gone against me (sometimes my emotion was justified, sometimes it wasn't!). I haven't always found my male coaches have responded helpfully to that emotion. I'm not saying female coaches should be kind fluffy bunnies and always be positive when it's not warranted, but I do believe in trying to listen to my athletes and respond to their queries, help them understand why decisions have been made and support them if they're upset. Push them on the water, support them off it.

Male friends responding to my straw poll have recognised this, acknowledging a different approach is needed when coaching women and girls to when they coach men. Maybe women are better equipped to deliver this. Equally, in the little coaching of men I've done I've found that my normal style of coaching doesn't work as effectively.

Perhaps the most important factor in trying to get more women to coach is the need for role models. A friend who is part of a mostly-female gymnastics coaching team notes that they tend to lose boys after a few years, looking for a male coach. Personally I've respected the achievements of the men who have coached me, but I know I'm more likely to respond to someone who has trodden the same path before me. As a woman, that person will be female.

That doesn't mean I'm arguing that only women can coach women's sport, and only men can coach men's, but I do think we need a better balance across all sports, and we need more women leading coaching teams at elite level to be the role models for those athletes who retire and could, perhaps, move into coaching. Where's the incentive or the examples for our top female track and field athletes to stay in their sport and pass on their knowledge to the next generation when all they see around them are male faces telling them what to do?

Obviously there are other barriers to encouraging women to coach, not least the fact that many amateur and professional athletes retire from sport when they have children. But I've seen men juggling coaching with childcare successfully - barriers are there to be overcome, not to accept.

There is also a cultural element to this. It looks as though we're especially bad at encouraging women to coach in the UK. US Athletics, for example, had a whole team of female coaches for their women's team in Rio, led by four-time Olympian Connie Price-Smith. The US women's soccer team (the current World Cup champions) are coached by a woman.

However even as I was finishing this blog post I stumbled across a new initiative designed to address the lack of female participation - and female coaches - in tennis. Spearheaded by tennis coach Judy Murray, She Rallies kicks off this weekend with a female coaching conference. Murray's got the support of the Lawn Tennis Association behind her. This, it seems to me, is exactly the sort of thing more governing bodies should be encouraging. By tackling the dual problem of fewer girls playing a sport and fewer women coaching it, they might just bring about the sort of change which most of us would love to see.

Many thanks to all my fabulous friends who contributed insightful thoughts and comments on this topic!