The sport world must ensure that women and girls have equal access to sport and physical activity, regardless of economic circumstance. This can be achieved through targeted initiatives that focus on equality and equity. These include providing scholarships and reduced training fees for girls and women, training sports journalists in inclusive reporting, promoting female athletes and events, and ensuring that promotional materials do not portray men as superior athletes.
It is also important to promote gender-equalising programmes and policies at a wider level, including support for broader social change in areas such as education, labour market participation and childcare. This can help break down the barriers that have historically impeded the pursuit of equality in sport, such as discrimination and harassment. It is crucial to invest in enhancing and enforcing sporting safeguarding standards and legal frameworks to prevent abuse, hold perpetrators accountable and offer remedies to victims. This will complement investments in improved mechanisms for reporting abuse, and in the infrastructure that underpins them.
The #MeToo movement and other feminist campaigns have helped to transform the landscape for women’s sports. But the challenge is to sustain this momentum for real and lasting change. Achieving gender parity at the Olympics, for example, is a welcome milestone, but when a convicted rapist leads a team in Paris or the BBC hires a pundit with links to misogynists it highlights that we have not yet made the progress that we need to.
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