In search of the reach of women’s sports: Looking backwards and forwards across the UK

– Sarah Oxford –

Modern sport, meaning the team-organised variety with “a set of strict, precise rules which needed to be respected everywhere in the same way, in spite of local conditions and features”, appeared in 19^th Century England as a way to organise the masses during the transition to industrialisation and democracy (Bouzou, 89). Sport in the British colonies ensued and as such historians have argued that “sporting practices are historically produced, socially constructed, and culturally defined to serve the interests and needs of powerful groups in society (Bandya et al., 3).”

Since inception sport and the cash-cow elements of professional sport have been male-centric; however, because sport reaches all levels of society as a leisure activity, it naturally created (although grudgingly) a pathway to challenge gender norms. Oddly, it appears that due to modern circumstances, breakthroughs in gender stereotypes via sport happened less in the UK than in the USA.

The biggest surprise I’ve encountered as an American living in UK is the inherent sexism within sports. Besides Jessica Ennis, I rarely see women athletes in the media. Moreover, the idea of me as a footballer (regardless of awards or capability) is repeatedly questioned as if preposterous.  My own co-ed football team (note: I was the only girl this year) even fit the bill offering perverse ‘compliments’ such as you’re good for a girl and Sarah’s basically a guy.

Peace Studies FC

The backwards comments are disturbing, yet logical considering their role-models, such as Sir Bobby Charlton, are making similar delusional remarks. In reference to the British women’s football team, he said:

I have been watching women’s games on television and I have had to remind myself I am not watching the men. And I mean that as a compliment…

I need to do further research on feminist movements in Britain as I’m unclear what happened to allow this far-reaching male chauvinism in sport to exist in 2012. It’s especially ponderous because much theoretical debate about women and sport took place in GB and the First World Conference on Women and Sport took place in Brighton in 1994. More puzzling is that GB’s role in development and peace that I have seen here in East Africa includes top-down funding to socially inclusive sports programs. Fascinating hypocrisy?

This response to my first question, leads me ask:

Why did the USA move towards sports equity faster than the UK? Are there comparable laws like Title IX in other countries? Why is women’s football in USA, Japan, Germany and Brazil more advanced than other nations? Where is the impetus in the UK to fund women’s athletics in LMIC’s coming from? What is the importance of top-down legislation compared to grassroots efforts when it comes to developing a culture of acceptance and equality in sport? Does inclusion of women in sport create pathways for increased female participation in education, business, government? And if so, does social inclusion in sport lead to a more peaceful society?

Works Cited

Bouzou, Joel (2010): Peace Through Sport: When Myth Becomes Reality. Armand Colin/ IRIS, Paris.

Susan J. Bandya, Gigliola Gorib & Dong Jinxiac (2012): From Women and Sport to Gender and Sport: Transnational, Transdisciplinary, and Intersectional Perspectives, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 29:5, 667-674

The Ripple Effect

– Sarah Oxford – 

I can’t tell you how many times on the playground as a kid I heard a boy defame another by saying “you throw like a girl”. As a super-athletic girl, it baffled me. When I thought about it, it never made sense: I am a girl and I’m good at sports. I often beat boys at sports. So why wouldn’t he want to throw like me? Where is the link between my private parts and anyone else’s throwing skills?

Gender discrimination in sport is something every female athlete must face from novice to professional irrespective of nationality. As most female athletes know, when confronting sexism of this nature it’s empowering, uncomfortable and exhausting.

Swish!

To be blunt and elementary, sexism is stupid. It belittles the individual and then society-at-large by discouraging and thus not maximising on 50% of a populations potential. In sport it’s in all levels, but most destructive is structural sexism which deters the creation of youth programs, obstructs professional women’s athletic endorsements and therefore largely reduces the existence of female role-models.

Luckily for me, as mentioned here, I’m a Title IX girl. So even though many of the boys on my playground repeated jeers learned from their adult mentors in attempts to disparage my athletic career and boost their insecure egos, I had a message from the top-down that I could succeed. And with leaders like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoting sports as a vehicle for female empowerment abroad, that message keeps getting stronger all over the world.

A recent Washington Post article revealed that at the 2012 London Olympics the US Women won “two-thirds of the U.S. team’s golds and nearly 60 percent of the overall medals.” Judo, boxing and football (soccer) are only a few of the internationally male-dominated sports of which the US team dominated at the olympics, disproving stereotypes of frailty liken to femininity. (The next sentence is to be read in haut-voice.) “If the U.S. women were their own nation, they would have finished third in the gold medal table with 29 medals.” That’s beating the US men (15), China (17), and Great Britain (16).

Expanding upon the above numbers, The Huffington Post published an article discussing the imagined potential of societies where women’s rights and opportunities expand to every “sector of society, government and business.”

The World Economic Forum has found that those countries where women and men are closer to enjoying equal rights are far more economically competitive than those where women have little or no access to medical care, education, elected office and the marketplace. Imagine the progress we could make in economic and technological development, in global health, in democratic governance, if the potential of women in each of these fields could be finally and fully unleashed.

Supporters of women’s sports and female athletes are rejoicing at this monumental victory in women’s athletics and expect a ripple effect throughout the world. But exactly where does this ripple go and for how long? Where should the line of expectation be drawn?

To be continued…

 

Show me the money!

– Sarah Oxford –

A common theme I’ve discussed with SDP program directors is “losing” girls between age 16 and 18. They’re not certain if it’s because the girls/women gain household responsibilities, get married,  have children, or if it’s their interests when entering adulthood that pull them in different directions.

Two approaches are taking place. One is to create flexible mothers-only teams. This provides that specific group of women a social support network and platform to discuss the new challenges they are facing as mothers. Second, many programs, though unsuccessfully, are attempting to link the team with IGA’s (Income Generating Activities).

Sarah interviews Liz at VAP, Nairobi

As many feminists before me have argued, a woman’s empowerment lies in her economic freedom. Psychologically and through labels she will be considered the property of someone else until she can provide for herself. This is evermore evident in poverty-stricken areas where marriage includes a dowry/bride price (when a woman is exchanged through the transfer of goods from groom to father or vice versa), or the woman is forced into prostitution/sexually manipulated (sugar daddy) in order to acquire basic goods for survival.

But are sports teams the right platform for business? Perhaps, and perhaps not. From what I’ve witnessed thus far programs of this nature don’t appear to be successful. Is it the funding? Interest? Experience? I’m not sure. For a business to survive, there needs to be a magic combination of knowledge, an open market and participant investment (time, money, interest, overall-dedication).  Perhaps setting up entrepreneurial classes in cooperation with banks that will allow for low interest loans could be one possibility.

Otherwise, the project needs to be all encompassing like Second Sight’s program in India which trains a girls football team every morning and provides classes in the field of optometry by day,  which will lead them to jobs in the local hospital in the long term. Second Sight is a full investment as participants and their families must sign contracts that pledge the girls won’t marry until their twenties, but it also guarantees them education and a career (aka economic independence). So far, this is the only successful program using sport as a hook and following it up with a real, sustainable job that I’ve found.

Girls on the bottom- How do we break the cycle?

– Sarah Oxford –

I’ve observed girls sports programs throughout East Africa for a couple months now. And although evidence is mostly anecdotal, I wholeheartedly believe that these programs make a big difference in girl’s lives.

Research concerning girls and the impact of sports hasn’t been conducted to the extent needed. What has been done is research in Western nations that can be used as insight to the importance and benefit in the lives of adolescent girls there, and thus as a motivator for more research to be done in places with budding youth sport programs like East Africa.

In 1997 The Presidents Council on Physical Fitness and Sports researched and documented a positive correlation between girls and regular participation in sports. The report stated that these girls “tended to do better academically and have lower school drop-out rates” and “showed reduced symptoms of stress and depression…”A follow-up report revealed that female athletes in the United States “tend to become sexually active later in life, have fewer sexual partners, and, when sexually active, make greater use of contraception than their non-athletic counterparts.” (MYSA, Letting Girls Play, 2002).

Let’s not assume that there is a direct correlation between athletes across the globe, as people face various challenges in studies of this nature, but let’s also not ignore what sports can give a child.

A typical child raised in a slum is born into a world of disadvantages. Her health, sanitation, and nutrition will not be of standard. She will be less likely to attend school and more likely to be introduced to violence and sexual promiscuity. It’s the brutal cycle of poverty.

Mathare Slum, Nairobi, Kenya

However, give her an organized sports team and many of those ailments can be alleviated. She can face challenge without dire consequence (decision making on the pitch), she can form a family away from home, and she will partake in exercise that benefits her health. Now couple her team’s practices with an educational curriculum that uses an interactive educational methodology to teach about Aids prevention, puberty, sexual relations and conflict resolution. On top of that she is given a free number to call for any reason (most often domestic or gender based violence) and told she has free access to lawyers. Being a part of a program of this nature definitely beats idleness or remaining in an unsafe environment all day. The cost to her is nothing, the gain, everything.

MYSA U-13 Football Champions

I’m not saying this team won’t make up for child-abuse, because nothing can replace a loving and providing parent. No it doesn’t make up for rape and it won’t give her dinner money that she can find by partaking in forced prostitution.

But it will give her the opportunity to see that there is more to life than the world she knew before joining the team and more importantly it will provide her with the skills needed to move away from—or improve—her world.

Gulu

We’ve made it to Uganda and are currently in Gulu, having spent a couple of days in Kampala. We came up here to attend the end of season awards day for a project run by The Kids League (TKL) and Gulu Disabled Person’s Union (GDPU). This is a three-year project that receives funding from Comic Relief, the Premier League (we think the English one) and Motivation, to increase participation in sport of those with physical disabilities. Conflict in this area ceased in 2007, and it seems many were still in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps until 2009, where they contracted diseases such as polio that have left them with various disabilities including the inability to walk, hear and see. We were told that this has been treated as a cause of shame for many families, who therefore keep such children inside the house, restricting them from education, developing friendships and participating in sports. This project aims to change this by creating many opportunities for participation in sport, thereby improving health, creating friendships, teaching life skills and giving confidence that these children do indeed have the ability to play a full part in their community. The project also has a strong one-on-one mentoring system in place to discover and meet the individual needs of participants.

The Kids League has also sent teams abroad, achieving spectacular successes. They have won twenty of the twenty-three tournaments entered across Europe, including the most prestigious cup in world youth football! Players from this team have gone on to represent Uganda and one has just been transferred to a French top division team. We also saw a new type of football design that we were told has the potential to revolutionise football in Africa: It’s an indestructible football, developed by the musician Sting’s manager (who knew?). We got to feel and bounce it, and were told that the program manager tested it by driving his car forward and backwards over it and it didn’t break!

We’ve heard and read a little about the impact of the Kony 2012 video here. There was anger at the military solution suggested by Invisible Children because at the time of the violence, many people were forced to live in IDP camps, and having now been allowed to return to their villages and homes, the people do not want another militarisation of this area, forcing them to return to the camps. The area is now safe, and has been for the last five years, and Joseph Kony and the LRA are now thought to be in the Congo, a distance approximate to how far the UK is from Slovakia!