With the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup starting this week, with matches taking place across Australia and New Zealand, the hype around women’s sport is at all time highs. It’s exciting! But while women and girls are dead keen to support female athletes, we’re curiously not as into playing sport ourselves – only 35% of women and girls do a sport-related activity one a week. And this small cohort is really carried by school aged girls, with a huge drop off in female sports participation from age 15. It’s not just the exercise-related benefits or potential to become the next Sam Kerr that women are missing out on. Sports offer us incredible mental health, community connection and even professional benefits… not to mention just having plain old fun!
So why are Australian women and girls skipping sports, and what can we do to turn that around?
Why aren’t women playing sports?
You can’t find solutions if you don’t understand the problems. So we asked Dr Clare Hanlon, the Susan Alberti Women in Sport Chair at Victoria University, why women’s sport participation is so low. “Girls and women often prefer active recreation over competitive sport,” she says. While that’s not a universal preference of all women, most sporting codes and clubs fail to recognise it as a factor at all. They don’t offer differentiated activities (playing for fun, instead of playing to win), which leads to losing female participants or failing to attract them in the first place. It’s a failure to diversify.
“There are so many different sports and physical activities out there that are now opening more and more for girls and women… they can start swapping and changing things.” Even though community sport doesn’t exist solely to create elite or professional athletes, the idea of professional competition is kept alive with grading systems, ladders, and end-of-season awards. It’s fantastic for people who enjoy competitive fun, but for those who don’t suburban sport can feel weighed down by gender stereotypes and performance anxieties. “Will I be seen as ‘manly’ if I play AFL?”, “Why would I even try this sport if I don’t know whether I’ll be very good?” Making accommodations for more social, less competitive sport streams where you come, you play, and no running tally of wins or losses is kept, could increase the appeal to women and girls.
The age where stronger participation ends, 15, is also a crucial clue. “That’s a very vulnerable age. They’re self-conscious in how they look, there is a fear of judgment,” Dr Hanlon says. At a time when young girls are highly susceptible to external influence, only seeing incredibly talented elite female athletes could be having a counterintuitive effect. At 20, only five years older, Mary Fowler is already playing for the Matildas – she is an outlier of what it means for a woman to play sport. Only being exposed to outliers who achieve international glory may not be very encouraging, as you’re very unlikely to ever be as good as them. It’s perhaps more important to see everyday women play and enjoy sport regardless of skill. “The more girls and women see others participating in sports and activities, the more they can relate to it and want to do it.”
But low participation rates means girls don’t see women well-represented in social, low-stake sports participation. So the cycle continues!
And then there is a persistent issue of whiteness and exclusive spaces, which affects community sport as much as it does every other issue in Australian life. Just as clubs, sports and facilities that are heavily male-dominated do not feel welcoming to young women, those that don’t actively show how they embrace culturally and linguistically diverse communities, queer people or people with disabilities, they will never feel like safe or fun spaces. “If the facilities aren’t going to be welcoming and inclusive for first-time experiences, they’re going to run the other way,” Dr. Hanlon warns.
This requires a lot of thought and intentional decision-making from coaches, administrators, current members… Given there is also very low participation rates of women and diverse individuals in these roles, it’s unsurprising that getting involved in sport feels so intimidating for many.
Running an ad campaign to tell women and girls to sign up to community sports will not work if these issues are never addressed.
Does it matter if women don’t play sports?
If, like me, you also tried to get out of every school sports carnival, you might think the issue is redundant. Surely women that want to play do so, and those that don’t get to spend their time on other interests. Does it actually matter? It’s an interesting question we thought hard about while working on this piece. The impact is much bleaker than I initially thought.
Dr. Hanlon emphasized that sport and physical activities are essential for women’s overall health: “social, mental, and physical.” The physical health impacts are the easiest to understand, but also the easiest to replace with things like going to the gym, or doing home pilates workouts. Exercise is not sport alone, and you should move your body in whichever manner you most enjoy.
It was the personal growth aspect that was most surprising. “Research continues to show that later on in life, if girls do participate in sport or physical activity, that actually helps with their determination and motivation,” Dr Hanlon says. By reducing women’s opportunities to participate in sports, we limit their ability to develop confidence, determination, leadership skills and reinforce the idea that sport is for boys and leadership is for men.
And lastly, sport has long been an activity that connects people to their local community. The pandemic has left people feeling lonely and isolated, and Dr Hanlon believes that sport involvement is a great way to counter those feelings and rebuild social skills we may have lost. “We need to have sports that provide fun and socially connect girls and women.” Community building is an important source of power, but it’s not always easy to build networks outside of your own family and existing friendships. Participating in sport provides all the essential ingredients for building relationships: having a common goal, getting past small talk, and having regular contact.
How do we get the gals into sport?
To increase women’s sport participation rates, we need to implement intersectional solutions that recognize and embrace diversity. Dr. Hanlon stresses: “Women are not a homogenous group. We vary, so we need to make sure that we’re providing the space, the programs, and an environment that is inclusive.” It will require a big shift in the way educational institutions, sports clubs and policymakers look at the issue.
1. Diversify Sports Offerings: Sports organizations need to update their offerings to incorporate more recreational elements and options that appeal to diverse interests and abilities. “If they’re going to stick the traditional type of sport that’s been played they’ll continue losing girls, because girls and women know what they want.”
2. Enhance Facility Accessibility: Sports facilities are accessible to all individuals, irrespective of their gender, ability, or background. It really comes down to the nitty gritty, even to things like transport. “Families where both parents are working, what does that then mean in relation to transport to and from venues?” Dr Hanlon points out. Inclusive facilities and removing physical barriers will be a huge boost to more equal participation. This responsibility not only falls on educational and sporting institutions, but also the government that funds these programs.
3. Promote Positive Body Image and Confidence: Supporting girls and women during critical stages, especially during puberty, is essential. This means making a hard, fast adjustment in how society talks about the body when it comes to sports. It also means uniforms need to be more size-inclusive, able to accommodate physical disabilities, and comfortable. “What are the sport uniforms, do they provide choice? Research that we’re finding in our study, both nationally and internationally, is that girls and women that may drop out of sport based on the uniforms. If you wear a piece of clothing, and you’re not comfortable in it, you’re shoveling it in the back of your drawer or recycling it.” It all contributes to the idea that sport is only for some women – which is just not true.
4. Representation, Representation, Representation: Dr. Hanlon wants to see better “visibility and representation of diverse groups in sports.” Leveraging major events like the FIFA Women’s World Cup is the perfect opportunity to reignite that interest for women and celebrating the exceptional talents… so long as we continue to promote grassroots-level participation long after the Cup has been won. Representation shouldn’t be limited to elite sportswomen. Do female characters in media play sport for fun? Are female celebrities or personalities asked about playing sport for enjoyment? “We want to keep moving in that direction to increase the visibility. If that happened, you would certainly have more girls and women being active.”
Smart people read more:
Yeah the Girls! A Deep Dive on Being a New Fan of Formula One
Why an emphasis on ‘fun’ could be the clincher in community sport clubs attracting more women – Women’s Agenda
The Radically Inclusive World of England’s Grassroots Women’s Soccer Clubs – TIME Magazine
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