Gender equality in sport — levelling the playing field

In the run up to International Women's Day on 8 March, Alliance CEO Emma Boggis discusses the themes to come from an event she attended that aimed at levelling the playing field for women in sports administration.

On Tuesday evening this week I attended an interesting event hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat with the Pioneers in Sport Policy Forum. The subject was Levelling the playing field – Championing a culture of equal opportunity in sports administration.

The speakers included Anna Kessel from Women in Football and Louise Martin, Chair of sportscotland, Chair of the Commonwealth Advisory Body on Sport and Honorary Secretary of the Commonwealth Games Federation.

Although the discussion wasn’t exclusively about gender equality, much of the debate focussed on this with both Louise and Anna giving their perspective on a range of issues. A few topics in particular stood out for me.

One was around the confidence women have in thinking about and then applying for senior positions. It is often quoted that – without generalising too much – when women look at job descriptions they often focus on the things they can’t do and don’t apply because of it, whereas men tend to focus on what they can do and if there are at least a couple of areas they feel confident they will apply even if there are some gaps in their skill set. The point that came out of the discussion was that we need to do more to give women the confidence to apply for roles and then the confidence to impress during the recruitment stage.

The second point was the difference between saying and doing. It is one thing to say an organisation welcomes applicants from a diverse range of backgrounds but then only to advertise through the "normal channels" but another to actively go out and look for new sources of applicants. Anna gave a great example of where Manchester City had used specialist recruiters to make sure that their advert for a marketing executive attracted applications from women as well as men.

Finally moving a little away from roles in sports administration, the issue of the profile of women’s sport was covered. Anna raised the good challenge of why the Men’s 100m Final remains the blue ribbon event at any athletics meet irrespective of the class of the field or what else is taking place and whether event organisers can and should be doing more to change old conventions.

Coincidentally, it was great to hear this week that England Hockey are doing just that when it comes to the schedule of events at this summer’s European Hockey Championships in London. Traditionally the Men’s Final has been the main event on the last day – but this year the Men are going to open the event, but the women are going to close it. In rowing as well, it’s been announced that the Boat Race this year will feature the men’s and women’s races on the same day. It does show that women’s sport is developing a higher profile and being slowly placed on an equal billing with male events. What, of course, will be interesting is how the media and ticket-buying public respond to this change.

To close, Anna challenged everyone in the room to consider themselves an influencer in this debate…what can we all do in our daily lives to help champion equal opportunity. Here at the Alliance we are supporting the Inspiring Women in Sport campaign and using our Alliance Director’s Club to build a diverse network of individuals who are either on or aspire to be on the board’s of our member organisations. We held a great event in November focussed on female non-executives and you will be able to read elsewhere in the newsletter the work we are doing with DCMS to support this further. But today I want to ask you, what are you doing to influence this debate?

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