The AWF is proud to congratulate Professor Celia Brackenridge on being awarded an OBE and Professor Sarah Springman on being awarded a CBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List. Both Celia and Sarah have contributed tremendously to the development and influence of the international women and sport movement. Both worked alongside Dr Anita White during the 1990s. Celia has been a major donor to the Anita White Foundation Archive and contributed to the launch of the Foundation last September. Sarah was a member of the GB Sports Council at the time of the Brighton Conference, and has also promised to donate materials.

Professor Brackenridge – a research professor and a member of the Brunel Centre for Sport, Health and Wellbeing – has conducted ground-breaking research in child protection and gender equity in sport and leisure. This has included being the programme consultant to the International Olympic Committee Medical Commission Consensus Statement on Sexual Harassment and Abuse in Sport, the UNICEF working group on violence against children in sport and chairing the Research Task Force of the NSPCC/Sport England Child Protection in Sport Unit. Additionally, she has served on research committees, edited journals and authored books on the research highlighted above.

A former international lacrosse player and Captain of the England team, Celia was a founding member of the UK Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation and has continued to advocate, consult and advise the wider international women’s sport movement. She is the Chair of the Local Organising Committee for the International Convention on Science, Education and Medicine in Sport, the global scientific conference that precedes each Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, which will be hosted in Glasgow, UK, later this year.

Celia told the AWF she was “flattered and delighted” to receive the award.

Prof. Celia Brackenridge has been awarded an OBE

Professor Springman OBE – President of the newly formed British Triathlon Federation since 2007 – has represented Great Britain at elite level and won many European Championship medals in Triathlon. She is a leading figure in British and World triathlon, which is arguably one of the most gender equal sports in terms of competitive opportunities and prize money. In 1990, she founded and co-Chaired the International Triathlon Union (ITU) Women’s Commission until 1992, writing the equity policies that remain a cornerstone of the organisation today. She was the ITU Vice President from 1992-1996 during the period in which triathlon was awarded programme status in the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. In 1997, she was made an OBE for services for sport. She has since been made an Honorary Member of the ITU and continues to lead the British Triathlon Federation, becoming a Vice President of ITU once more in 2008. Furthermore, she was a key figure for Paratriathlon gaining Paralympic recognition and inclusion in the 2016 Games and the Mixed Team Relay being added to the Commonwealth Games programme.

In addition to her exceptional career related to triathlon, she is a Professor of Geotechnical Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Prof. Sarah Springman OBE has been awarded a CBE (picture from britishtriathlon.org)

The BBC Sports Personality of the Year event will take place on Thursday 22nd December. The ten athletes shortlisted for the main award are all males. AWF Chair Dr Elizabeth Pike offers this critique of the forthcoming event:

The current discussions regarding the BBC Sports Personality of the Year are merely the tip of a male-dominated iceberg. An examination of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year event indicates that in the years since it was introduced in 1954, there have been only 13 female individual winners of the Sports Personality of the Year award, equating to approximately 20% of the total winners. We should not be complacent and think that this is merely the product of historical trends. In 2010 the winner of every single award was male:

BBC Sports Personality of the Year: AP McCoy

Helen Rollason: Sir Frank Williams

Young Sports Personality of the Year: Tom Daley

Unsung Hero: Lance Haggith

Team: Ryder Cup

Overseas: Rafael Nadal

Coach: Colin Montgomery

Lifetime achievement: David Beckham

For those who watch the BBC Sports Personality of the Year on television, it may not be a surprise to discover that analysis of the ceremony itself over the last 10 years has found that only approximately 10% of the total media coverage during the event is dedicated to women’s sport. During the ceremony, when the camera pans to the audience for close-up shots, more than 70% of these shots are of men.

The ten BBC SPOTY contenders are all male

The issues raised by the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist are indicative of broader concerns with gender inequity in sports.  These are particularly significant as the UK prepares to showcase its sporting prowess on a global stage with the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games less than 10 months away. In 2009, Tessa Jowell wrote to senior British officials in her capacity as Olympics Minister at the time stating: ”It will be an embarrassment for London 2012 if there isn’t an equal number of events for men and women at the Games.  They have to be the same.  It’s an embarrassment in this day and age that there is a discrepancy between male and female events.  We’re not living in the dark ages here.”  However, the reality is there will still be less events available to women in 2012.  For example, while boxing has been introduced for women at the Olympics for 2012 there are only 3 events for women but 10 for men; and in rowing there are 6 events for women but 8 for men.  At the Paralympics, there is no football for women at all.  Furthermore, women constitute only approximately 10% of the British coaching squad and less than a third of the board members of sports associations in the UK, including the organising committee for the 2012 Games itself. 

While we should be disappointed that we are still a long way from gender equity in sports, maybe we should not be surprised.  In 1996, the Atlanta Olympics were officially dubbed ‘The Games of the Woman’, and yet only 34% of athletes present were female and 26 countries sent only male athletes to the Games.  More recently, in the Beijing Games of 2008 approximately 42% of Olympians but only one-third of Paralympians were female.  In addition, analysis of the media coverage of the Olympics demonstrates that journalists are less likely to refer to female athletes or women’s sport, and when they do so, women are often referred to in stereotypical ways which demean their sporting achievements, drawing attention to their sexual attractiveness, their family life, and by pejorative comments which trivialise female athletes as “girls” rather than “women”.  As Eastman and Billings (2000, 192) have argued, “although sexism of any kind is increasingly less acceptable in public discourse … there are sportscasts that seem to speak a private, male-only language and operate rather as private clubs for men”.

While this ongoing gender inequality in sport persists despite decades of campaigning and equity policies, the UK is at the forefront of initiatives to challenge these trends.  In 2011, the Anita White Foundation was launched in honour of the woman who chaired the organising committee for the first world conference on women and sport hosted in the UK in 1994.  Anita White also captained the England women’s hockey team to World Cup victory but was never able to compete in the Olympics because the event was not open to women during the years she played. The 1994 conference resulted in “The Brighton Declaration”, which is the global benchmark for efforts to redress imbalances women face in their participation and involvement in sport at all levels and has since been adopted by 260 international and national organisations across the world.  At the event to launch the Anita White Foundation, hosted by the University of Chichester, a panel of international experts examined the progress, pitfalls and potential for gender equality in sport, and asked to what extent the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics will be ‘gender equal’ games.  The Anita White Foundation is now the centre of an international network of scholars and activists who are working together to transform sporting opportunities for women and girls around the world.

Dr Elizabeth Pike

Chair of the Anita White Foundation

Head of Sport Development and Management, University of Chichester

President-Elect, International Sociology of Sport Association

Co-author “Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies”

The AWF has been closely following the response to the shortlisting of 10 sportsmen by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) for its renowned Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) award. The voting process has been critiqued by Dr Elizabeth Pike (Chair of AWF), Sue Tibballs (CEO of the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation (WSSF)) and a variety of athletes and media commentators for the lack of recognition of female athletes. The BBC has since announced it will review its selection process. In reaction to the continued marginalisation of women over time, The Sunday Times has staged the Sportswomen of the Year (SWOTY) award since 1988. In December 2011, it was won by Taekwondo World Champion Sarah Stevenson.

The response from Dr Elizabeth Pike can be read in a post above.

The response by Sue Tibballs can be heard by listening to the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Woman’s Hour’ from 26 minutes into the show.

The AWF is now on Facebook and Twitter

You can now follow the AWF on Twitter ‘@women_in_sport’ and on Facebook by searching for the ‘Anita White Foundation’.

The launch of the Anita White Foundation is now published under the ‘Launch’ tab.

In summary, the AWF was launched at the University of Chichester on September 14th, attended by many people from the women and sport movement, former and present students and staff of the university, including 14 who attended the Brighton Conference in 1994. The Vice Chancellor of the University of Chichester, Professor Clive Behagg, opened proceedings by referring to the university’s history in supporting women’s education and pledging its support for and commitment to the AWF in the future.  The panel of distinguished experts; Professor Jay Coakley (Honorary Fellow, University of Chichester), Professor Kari Fasting (President of WomenSport International), Raija Mattila (Co-Chair of the International Working Group on Women and Sport) and Sue Tibballs (CEO of the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation) discussed three main questions:

1)      Reflecting on the significance of the Brighton Declaration, what have been the main outcomes since 1994 and what are the continued challenges?

2)      What are the current priorities for the Women and Sport movement?

3)      What can we expect from the 2012 games? To what extent will they be “gender equal”?

Professor Celia Brackenridge (Honorary Fellow, University of Chichester) responded to the debate. Anita White closed proceedings by thanking all contributors and attendees and congratulated the University of Chichester for forming a unique partnership with the Women and Sport movement and establishing the AWF. A fuller account of the proceedings, as well as pictures and video extracts, will be available very soon.

The Anita White Foundation International Women and Sport Movement Archive is now on the archive hub.  To access follow this link: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/search/search.html and select the University of Chichester or any key word to access the catalogue.

We were pleased to welcome the following panellists for the panel discussion on September 14th 2011. These were: Professor Jay Coakley, Professor Kari Fasting, Raija Matilla and Sue Tibballs.  Celia Brackenridge responded to the panel.

Please read on for a short Biography of each panellist:

Jay Coakley.

Jay Coakley is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, USA and Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester. He received a PhD in sociology at the University of NotreDame and has since taught and done research on play, games, and sports, among other topics in sociology. In 1985 and 1986 he worked with Dr. Anita White at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education. Jay Coakley has received many teaching, service, and professional awards, and is an internationally respected scholar, author, and journal editor. His text, Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies is in its 10thedition withadaptations published in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom (with Elizabeth Pike), and translations in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. He continues to critically examine social phenomena and promote changes that will make social worlds more democratic and humane.

Professor Kari Fasting

Kari Fasting is a full professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Studies at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, Norway. She became the first elected chair of this institution and served as the rector from 1989 to 1994. She is past president of The International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA).  Her research area is different aspects related to sport and exercise in the lives of women. The main focus of her research during the last years however has been Sexual Harassment and Abuse in Sport.
She has been a member of the Women and Sport Committee in the Norwegian Confederation of Sports, and represented Norway on the European Sports Conference Working Group on Women and Sport, and participated in the reorganization of this group, which in 1994 became the free standing European Women and Sport Group (EWS). Kari Fasting is a founding member and past president of  WomenSport International (WSI). She is also representing WSI on the International Working Group on Women and Sport (IWG).

Raija Mattila, MA (Pol. Sc.), University of Helsinki

Raija is a former Director of Arts and Cultural Heritage Division as well as a  former Director of Sports Division in the Ministry of Education.  She has also been a  former Chair of the Committee for the Development of Sport (CDDS) in the Council of Europe and former Vice-President of the City Council of Kauniainen.
Her current positions of trust include: Co-chair of the International Working Group on Women and Sport (IWG), Vice-President of the Sibelius Academy (Music University in Helsinki) and Member of the Board of UKK Institute (Research Institute on Sport and Health)

Sue Tibballs

Sue Tibballs is Chief Executive of the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation (WSFF), the UK based charity that exists to make physical activity an integral part of women’s lives. An entrepreneurial campaigner and social marketer for fifteen years, Sue is a leading commentator and published specialist on gender equality in society. She has worked across the charity, government and commercial sectors including working as Campaigns Manager for The Body Shop, Projects Director for trends and insight consultancy, the Future Foundation and Chair of the Fawcett Society.

WSFF produced the first UK strategy to increase women’s participation in physical activity, “Creating a Nation of Active Women”; delivered the highly innovative Sweat in the City programme; and launched the Commission on the Future of Women’s Sport, a government-backed initiative to accelerate leadership, investment and profile for women’s sport in the UK.

Celia Brackenridge

Celia Brackenridge DSc, PhD, MA, BEd (Hons) Cantab, MILAM, AcSS, FBASES
Celia Brackenridge is a Professorial Research Fellow at Brunel University, London, where she is a member of the Brunel Centre for Sport, Health and Wellbeing. She is currently Chair of the Local Organising Committee for the 2012 International Convention on Science, Education and Medicine in Sport which will precede the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. www.celiabrackenridge.com