GIVING WOMEN MORE OF A VOICE

By Dean Gurden

It makes for depressing, though perhaps unsurprising, reading that just 1% of women working in sport today believe there is gender equality in the industry. That’s the finding of a recent report, ‘Voice of Women Working in Sport’, produced by Sporting Insights in partnership with the Women’s Sport Collective.

Based on an online survey of more than 850 women working at all levels across the sports industry, it’s just one of many statistics in the research that paint a bleak picture for women working in the sector, and those wanting to join.

And yet many do. In fact, the most common positive word used by the respondents to describe how it feels to be a woman working in sport is ‘empowering’. Despite the palpable barriers they felt existed to them carving out a successful career, they were still passionate and proud to be working in sport.

the need to draw a line in the sand, says Sue Anstiss MBE, founder and director of Fearless Women, and CEO of the Women’s Sport Collective. “We wanted more context in terms of statistics and numbers for the concerns that we were hearing on a regular basis,” she says.

“Th

Gender Equality

more to the point, the lack thereof, and data around funding in women’s sport, but in terms of their personal experience of working in the sector, we just couldn’t find anything.”

Taking A Measure

Anstiss talks about the need for a measure. After all, if you can’t measure something, you can’t tell if it’s getting worse or improving. “We’re basically asking: if this is women’s perception now, then what can we be doing to improve things and move forward?” she says. “We keep talking about wanting equity within the sports industry, but what does that look like and where are we now? Therefore, we decided to do research this year that we can then