‘SPORT HAS TO REFLECT SOCIETY’
Sport Ireland keen to assist governing bodies along road to gender balance
CHANGE can often seem an imperceptible ambition, but then a junior minister can make a bold statement and it triggers a memory of a very different world, only four years ago. In December 2016, Patrick O’Donovan was the Minister of State for Sport, with Shane Ross the senior figure in the portfolio.
O’Donovan created consternation when announcing that any sporting organisation in receipt of State support, and which failed to have at least 30 per cent of its board comprised of women, would see their funding cut. The reaction was instant and the proposal was barely spoken about again.
Until earlier this month, that is, when the current junior Minister at the Department addressed a Sport Ireland webinar on the topic of Women in Sport Leadership.
Jack Chambers was clear in stating that all governing bodies that access funding from the State, must reach the minimum 30 per cent gender balance on its board.
And continuing failures to do so could, he said, see their funding affected.
‘Improved gender balance on the boards of State bodies, enterprise, and community and voluntary associations is a major policy for our Government,’ said the Minister.
‘We really need to see some progress by those NGBs (national governing bodies) as quickly as possible. And if we do not see progress in this area, we will have to consider the imposition of gender quotas, rather than targets through the sports action plan.
‘Minister (Catherine) Martin and
I agree that if there are sporting bodies who fail to take appropriate steps to address the poor representation of women on their boards, this should be considered when making decisions around the allocation of public funds.’
The issue of women in sport has changed enormously in the four years and three months that separated the comments of O’Donovan and Chambers.
It is a topic that is now attracting serious engagement, but what has also changed is State policy.
In 2018, the Government of the time released its National Sport Policy. Prominent among the targets was that 30 per cent aim.
When the national Women in Sport policy was published in 2019, research showed that women made up an average of 24 per cent of board memberships across governing bodies. By March 2020, that had risen to 29 per cent and when Sport Ireland released its most recent figures last December, it remained at that figure.
That was the average, and a breakdown showed that 32 bodies had reached the 30 per cent target, while 34 had not. Among those that had reached or surpassed the figure were Basketball Ireland, Cycling Ireland, Rowing Ireland and Special Olympics Ireland.
None of the FAI, GAA or IRFU had done so, but the FAI was closest at 25 per cent, the GAA was at 11 per cent and the IRFU were 8 per cent. The Irish Athletic Boxing Association was one of six governing bodies that had no female representation on its board.
Dr Una May is the director of Participation and Ethics with Sport Ireland, and she says that intervention of the kind mooted by Minister Chambers, while an option, is not a first resort.
‘We’re reluctant to go down that road, but I think the minister was very clear that if we have to, we will consider it,’ she says.
‘Right now, it’s not the right approach, in our opinion. Our opinion is that there are a lot of areas that do require work still, and we want to give the support and provide the assistance through toolkits, webinars, any kind of assistance we can to help make that shift happen more organically within governing bodies, and within the sector in general.
‘But if it comes to it, and the Minister has demonstrated that willingness, if we have to, we recognise that’s something we consider in the future.’
This matters, of course, because fairness matters, and because one half of the population deserve to be represented as fully as the other half.
‘Sport has to reflect society,’ says May, simply. ‘In society, we have greater than 50 per cent of the population who are women, so it should be the same in all areas of sport, and that is what we are ultimately striving for.’
Board representation is, she says, just one manifestation of the change envisaged by documents like the Women in Sport policy, or the National Sports Policy itself.
‘It has identified the key areas we need to work on,’ she says of the Women in Sport policy, ‘in order to ensure we level the playing field across all areas of sport.
‘That identified four key pillars: leadership and governance, participation, visibility, and coaching and officiating.
‘In order to make a substantial change, a fundamental shift in the whole culture of sport, we need to tackle all those areas. ‘They all feed into each other, great levels of inclusion, greater gender diversity on boards, greater levels of women in coaching, will lead to greater involvement and greater levels of participation, which hopefully will create the life-long participation in sport that generally tends to lead in the direction of leadership.
‘It’s a constantly moving circle between participation and coaching and officiating.’
That was reflected in research released by Sport Ireland two weeks ago, which sought to address the enduring problem of teenage girls abandoning sport, in alarming numbers, between the ages of 13 and 15 in particular.
Seven per cent of girls aged 14 and 15 get the recommended amount of daily exercise.
Efforts to address this must, says Una May, be part of a wider approach that also simultaneously brings change at board level, as well as in the areas of officiating and coaching.
‘A lot of the progress at the moment is around developing supports and recognising the issues, and the insights into what the challenges are. So the next step then is to start implementing those, and hopefully in a few years we’ll see the benefit of all this work.
‘Sport Ireland invested €3million in Women in Sport, and national
‘THERE ARE SIGNS THAT WE ARE MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION’
‘WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO DO IN THE AREA OF YOUNGER PEOPLE’
governing bodies and local sports partnerships were challenged to produce initiatives, programmes, and all kinds of opportunities to increase women’s participation across all the different pillars, be that leadership, officiating, coaching, participation.
‘From our point of view, our role has been to provide the supports to build capacity in the sector.’
She is generous, too, about the efforts of bodies to engage on this issue. There are, she suggests, reasons beyond simply reluctance, if an organisation is struggling to meet its targets.
And one of the rare good news stories to emerge over the past year relates to female participation in sport and exercise generally.
‘I know it’s an exceptional time and doesn’t necessarily reflect the norm, but we have seen very strong levels of participation among women, in all levels of physical activity, during the pandemic.
‘There are signs that we are continuing to move in the right direction on participation, so that’s very heartening.
‘We obviously have an awful lot of work to do among younger people, hence the work we have dedicated recently around teenage girls.
And whereas five years ago O’Donovan’s suggestion of gender balance on boards became a brief political flare-up, May reveals that the 30 per cent target could soon be amended, upwards.
‘When it comes to board membership, we set targets. There are targets in the National Sport Policy.
‘Both ministers (Martin and Chambers) we have at the moment are very strong on the area of gender diversity on boards, and it’s agreed that in actual fact the targets in the sports policy are not ambitious enough.
‘It’s likely that we’ll strive for even greater levels of membership on boards.
‘At the moment the target is 30 per cent, but we are progressing well in that direction.’