Level the playing field and see us prosper

I found a website once that showed that New Zealand was the second best country in the world for women gaining medals at Olympic Games.

This is just one of the things that makes me deeply proud to be a New Zealander.

Seeing our young women on the podiums while our anthem plays, listening to them talk to interviewers about how they feel about their success and the challenges they overcome to achieve them is so relatable to us proud Kiwis.

They come from a country of three degrees of separation not six which means when we see our athletes on the sporting stage, we know them, not metaphorically but actually know them, or their parents, or their coach or their brother, or their friend. We are a small, closely-connected country.

Their relatability amplifies the inspiration these sportswomen can be to young girls and women who need to be active.

There’s a plethora of comprehensive research that shows young girls who are active in sports have more confidence, self-esteem and pride in their physical and social selves than those that are sedentary.

It also shows girls involved in sports are less likely to be involved in drugs, less likely to get pregnant, less likely to suffer depression and more likely to succeed academically.

With sports, girls develop transferable skills such as leadership, teamwork, setting goals, learning to win, learning to lose, learning to accept feedback, organisational and time management skills. And all this can be happening during arguably the most tumultuous time of their lives – the teen years.

A time when that perfect storm of high school, boyfriends, puberty, bullying, social pressures around smoking, drugs and alcohol abound. That abundance of uncontrollable life experiences able to permanently shape the future of a young girl.

Kiwi Professor Toni Bruce has been researching gender balance in sports media coverage in New Zealand – women’s sport receives less than 10 per cent and it has been this way for the past three decades.

But it is more than just volume. Unless the athletes are medalling at Olympic or Commonwealth Games, news stories will frequently patronise our elite athletes.

In February, Kereyn Smith, NZ Olympic Committee boss, called out the media, labelling its coverage of women’s sport as ‘‘horrifying bad’’.

Kereyn was heralding in a new era for women’s sport, with national sports organisation like rugby, football and rugby league already poring over plans to fundamentally shift the quality of the sporting experience they are offering elite female athletes and the attitude of the media covering them. Southland National Council of Women is marking Suffrage125 today , with a celebratory dinner at Ascot Park.

Just imagine if among the guests we could host a couple of those women who led the fight for votes for women 125 years ago, and who, just a few years later, established the National Council of Women.

Kate Sheppard, now the face of the women’s movement of that time, whose poised beauty and steady gaze looks at us every time we take a $10 note out of our wallet – yes, she would be one of our special guests.

The other would be Wilhelmina Sherriff Bain who taught in the Invercargill area in the early 1890s, before moving to Christchurch in 1896, where she hosted the inaugural meeting of the NCW.

She was a feminist and peace activist whose support for arbitration as a means of resolving conflict was rooted in her strong Christian faith and her belief in the bonds of humanity.

From 1910, Wilhelmina worked as a journalist in Riverton and looked after her invalid sister.

She vehemently opposed compulsory military training, and The Southland Times published her article on this theme in 1911.

However, peace was not her only interest: at NCW meetings she also spoke in support of prison reform, women jurors, protective laws for workers and the establishment of the principle of equal pay for equal work.

So what drove their passion for establishing the National Council of Women?

They realised that although they might have won the vote, men had no intention of sharing the real power, the parliamentary law-making role.

Those feminists knew that women – partly because of their concerns for their children – tended to have a different viewpoint on life, and looked beyond the present.