Competitive teamsport at university level is predominantly segregated by gender in many western countries, despite concerns that gender segregation in sport can perpetuate sexism and gender inequality. While policies and activities seek to challenge sexism and gender inequality, the use of gender collaboration within a gender-segregated system as a method to achieve this has received little attention. In this article, we draw on a year-long ethnography of elite sport and 48 in-depth interviews with elite male and female athletes at a British university to explore the impact of various forms of gender mixing during training, which we call ‘gender-collaborative training’. While men’s and women’s teams competing against each other in practice matches resulted in gender-essentialist narratives attributing difference to biology, gender-integrated practices and workouts provided opportunities for men and women to train together without the gendered sport-specific associations that can reproduce sexism. We call for gender-collaborative training to be adopted by gender-segregated teams, and suggest that where there is resistance to any integration, teams start with mixed physical workouts and progress to mixed sport-specific training and then mixed competitive training.

尽管人们担心体育运动中的性别隔离会加剧性别歧视和性别不平等，但在许多西方国家，大学级别的团队运动主要是按性别进行的。尽管政策和活动试图挑战性别歧视和性别不平等，但是在性别隔离的系统中使用性别协作作为实现这一目标的方法却鲜有受到关注。在本文中，我们借鉴了长达一年的民族体育民族志，并对一所英国大学的男女精英运动员进行了48次深度访谈，以探讨培训期间各种形式的性别混合的影响，我们称之为“性别-合作培训”。尽管男女队伍在实践比赛中相互竞争，但性别本质主义的叙事将生物学归因于差异，结合性别的做法和锻炼为男人和妇女提供了一起训练的机会，而没有可以重现性别歧视的专门针对性别的运动协会。我们呼吁性别隔离的团队采用性别协作式培训，并建议在无法进行任何整合的地方，团队应从混合体能训练开始，然后进行混合运动专用训练，然后再进行混合竞技训练。