Do any of you remember the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus? If so, great. If not, you should read it. It has some good stuff in there regarding how men and women communicate when it comes to relationships.
Now, I'm sure you're asking yourself, "How does a book on communication in relationships translate into coaching or training men versus women?" Well for those of you who didn’t know, I also work as a weight training teacher for the physical education department of a local university where I have a mixed group of kids ranging from freshman to the “trying to graduate senior.” As you would expect, most of the class is comprised of males with a few females sprinkled in. I've been doing this for the past five and half years. It isn't a situation where I teach Olympic lifting or anything like that. I'm merely teaching kids the basics of weight training and how to perform movements correctly so they don't look completely lost when they step into a real weight room.
Over the past few years, my teaching style has been rather schizophrenic (no offense to those who suffer from this disorder). I just have to be two completely different people at the same time. What I mean by this is that when I'm coaching the guys on, for example, how to fix their bench, I can use negative reinforcement and be crass. However, with the girls, I have to be soft-spoken, gentle, and encouraging yet stern. This simply comes from how guys and girls process information and words.
I had to learn this the hard way because for the first two years I was going H.A.M. on everybody, I noticed that the guys responded well, yet I couldn’t figure out why the girls weren't getting it and didn’t want to try. I then realized that it was how I was instructing them. I was using the same negative reinforcement that I used on the boys. To say the least, that was pretty ineffective.
As I stated earlier, if you coach or train girls, you can't in most cases use negative reinforcement. They will shut down and that is the last thing you want. As a whole, most guys respond well to that crass reverse psychology BS and will do better because they don’t want to suck in front of their friends. However, this isn't an excuse to belittle or put them down. Guys can only handle so much criticism, too, before they shut down. It helps when you can send the guys to elitefts™ for outside reading and the girls to the Girls Gone Strong website, knowing that they'll be encouraged to lift big and get strong(her).
So to answer the question that was posed in the title, yes, there is a difference in how you coach/train girls versus guys. It could make all the difference in their performance be it in a weight training class, in a game, or in a meet.