There are a number of stories this week on the personal impact from the lack of gender equality in sport. There was a lot of follow up from the first women’s Super Rugby Aotearoa match with calls to make it a permanent competition, but Chiefs and Black Ferns player Chelsea Alley shares the personal toll playing in the Super Rugby match.
AFL player Jacinda Barclay died earlier this year from suicide – her family donated her brain to research, the first ever female athlete of contact sport to do so. They found degradation of white matter potentially from concussion which may have led to her depression, but her family also shared the emotional toll and isolation Jacinda faced playing AFLW.
And former rower Zoe McBride shares her story of adjusting to life and how much happier she is now after giving up her elite rowing career.
This week in HerStory there were some big decisions, including Caster Semenya’s appeal to CAS and the Israel Folau saga in 2019 and NZ Rugby bringing back women’s NPC in 2011 after it was abandoned for financial reasons. Last year community sport was starting to return but we were still trying to gauge the impact of COVID-19 with funding starting to become available, and two years ago High Performance Sport NZ launched an interim independent complaints service, which eventually became a much needed permanent complaints and mediation service for all sports, from community to elite.
Check out all the media headlines in women’s sport for the 7th May right here.
Alida Shanks 