A new initiative from Carleton Athletics seeks to bring awareness to issues in women’s
sports at the university and improve the experience of its female athletes.
The Gender Equity Committee under the Ravens Varsity Council came to fruition after several discussions with student athletes in late 2019, according to Sheryl Hunt, assistant director of Marketing for Athletics. The discussions covered systemic problems of inequality
between men’s and women’s sports at Carleton.
The creation of the committee was sparked after an editorial was published by the Charlatan last fall about the unequal promotion of women’s games.
“We want to bridge the gap in terms of gender equity on campus for female athletes
versus male athletes. That’s a very simple statement, but it’s very complex,” Hunt said.
While the group is led by students for students, Hunt chairs the committee as the
Athletics representative, hoping to show student athletes that management is fully committed to creating change.
The committee’s spokesperson, women’s rugby player Roberta Drummond, echoes this sentiment.
“The school really wants to get ahead of these issues and work on them, instead of just posting a picture on Instagram because it’s Women in Sports Day,” Drummond said.
According to Drummond, these issues of gender equality in Carleton sports are not new. Lack of funding, unequal access to practice facilities and time slots, smaller dressing rooms, and lack of promotion on social media for women’s games are a few of the specific problems the committee hopes to address.
These problems are echoed within female sports communities across the board, from U Sports to house leagues.
A 2018 study on female engagement in sport led by sports business researcher Norm O’Reilly from the University of Guelph found insufficient funding was the number one barrier to sport participation for respondents.
“We pay to play, whereas a lot of the sports teams at Carleton don’t pay, we have to pay
team fees because we’re that severely underfunded,” Drummond said of the women’s rugby team.
For many female athletes, university sports are their last chance to play a game they’ve
loved for years. With very little avenues for professional sport post-graduation, being treated unequally to their male counterparts while in school is another blow.
Dr. Penny Werthner, Dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary,
mentioned this in a meeting of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in 2016.
“It’s often not a comfortable environment for our women athletes, and, at worst, it’s an
environment of subtle ridicule,” Werthner told the House of Commons concerning
competitive sport in Canada.
She said that male skills and physique are still viewed as the norm in women’s sport and sports in general.
Ravens Varsity Council’s new Gender Equity Committee will seek to create actionable change in the Carleton athletic community in order to change how women’s sports have been treated in the past.
“There’s stigma, there’s stereotypes, girls can’t play sports, they’re not as good as guys, they don’t deserve to be on TV, they shouldn’t be paid, there’s no professional women’s sports, there’s no avenues, there’s no development,” Drummond said.
One example of planned actionable change is a woman in sports seminar, which is underway but has been delayed due to public health restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The committee will bring together female athletes, industry professionals, and scholars to have a conversation about what it means to be a woman in sport.
A photoshoot intended to celebrate the physical and mental strength and diversity of female athletes is also in the works.
The committee also oversees LGBTQ+ inclusion and is planning ongoing initiatives to
celebrate pride.
“We’re going to create actionable change,” Drummond said. “We’re not just going to be
reactive, and we are going to start a shift across U Sports.”
Featured image by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
