Most stories this week on women’s sport focus on the Olympics with selections, team announcements and heartbreak for those not qualifying. Of course there was a big neon, international spotlight on the brave Laurel Hubbard’s qualification.
I came across this article from earlier this year on how the NCAA appear to be fudging the numbers of the U.S. women’s basketball league to be able to keep saying “it’s not profitable” to justify how women’s basketball is treated. But someone did some digging and the numbers don’t add up. There are some really interesting questions in here that could (and should) be asked of other national sports organisations.
Both of these issues just reinforce the notion that the problem is the current system. There is a good summary this week here on exactly that.
The Guardian published the finalists of the Australian women in sport photo action awards – check them out to see some awesome powerful shots of a range of sports women in action.
This week in herstory there were a number of key events, including in 1985 it took legal action to stop an All Black tour of South Africa who were subject to a global sporting boycott; the first details of the toxic culture at NZ Football is revealed in 2018 and adds to the growing list of sports under review; in 2019 a bunch of male school principals ban an 11 year old girl from playing rugby; in 2020 a report from the Human Rights Commission finds there is widespread discrimination of the rainbow community in Aotearoa; it’s revealed AUT management has investigated less than a third of sexual harassment complaints (spoiler alert: this gets worse and it’s still not better); voting rights are restored to prisoners serving less than 3 years (although legally all prisoners should be allowed to vote); and a year ago the head of female engagement at Cricket Australia was made redundant because “covid”.
Check out all the media headlines in women’s sport for the 25th June right here.
Alida Shanks 