It’s the grouping of two subsets of participants, who have very different needs, challenges and goals in their sport. Just by nature of their gender, they are put in their box. I’m not talking about the division of men and women in sports, rather the tendency to package all ages and stages of athletic women together. To write one plan for women and girls.
To understand why this is so odd, consider the alternative. Not once in my sporting life have I come across a men and boys strategy. Some may argue that’s just due to the nature of their assigned role as sports’ default participants. Look closer, however, and you see the systematic understanding of the needs of different ages. You don’t have a men and boys strategy because there is instead a plan for community and for high performance. That goes for for junior and senior and heck, even schoolboy participation. However, their sisters in sport get no such treatment.
Sports scientist Dr Stacy Sims famously explained that women in sport are not small men or large children. Why, then, do sports persist with this framing in their strategies? It smacks of a benevolent paternalism, infantilising women and training most of our efforts on girls.
It’s easy to see why people have a bias towards this grouping. Putting women and girls together allows you to report wins no matter how lopsided. Girls are the low-hanging fruit. Their memories are as short as your programme’s history. They don’t come with any baggage, with fewer expectations and no pesky ideas like pay equity. Girls in sport are a lovely clean slate, allowing codes to present themselves in the best light. It will take these girls a while to look around and ask, where are the women?
Rather than be held up as an example of exceptional talent, school-age girls in women’s sport should instead be a red flag of poor programming that has seen older players leave the sport or fail to reach their potential. When sports constantly pull from younger talent pools, they weaken the feeder competitions and individualise success and failure. A young star who doesn’t successfully clear the transition from schoolgirls’ to women’s sport is to blame, not the gap in the development strategy that makes climbing the high-performance ladder so treacherous.
The women part of women and girls strategies is rarely focused on those playing the game, instead it’s about leadership. Those behind the strategies want women on boards, as coaches and officials. They want to put these women in spaces that are still overwhelmingly filled with men. In the room with the levers of power but keeping them at arm’s length. Get frustrated and you’re out. But that’s okay, it’s about reporting current numbers in the roles, not the number you’ve burnt through.
That’s my underlying frustration with these strategies. It’s women and girls, together in a title but wholly separate in reality. Not acknowledging your women were once girls, full of hopes and dreams of their sport and their place in it. Or recognising that your girls will soon be women and failure to plan for their ascension is building a conveyor belt to nowhere.
If you want to write a strategy for women and girls in your sport, write them into your existing plans. Your strategy for junior sport, for community sport, for high performance should all feature them. You can hold on to individual targets, set ambitious goals and hold your stakeholders accountable but to normalise the place of women and girls in your sport, write them into it.
