First, the good news! The International Olympic Committee have announced that they are supporting the 8th International Working Group in Women and Sport conference, happening in Tāmaki Makaurau in May 2022. In addition to bringing the IOC’s mana to this event, this support comes in the form of investment as well as experts presenting at the conference. I am particularly excited about this news because I am presenting a workshop at the event with Central Football on the work we have done over the last two years on diversity and inclusion in their organisation. I’m looking forward to sharing the results of what we have been working on, and also learning from the amazing speakers that will be there (in person and virtually).
Good news for NZ Football this week announcing they’ve signed Ford as the naming rights sponsor for the Football Ferns, as well as the national women’s league and coach and player development programmes. Also of note this week was the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup announcing a partnership with PORSE, who will provide childcare at all 31 matches, surely a first for a major event.
NZ Football also announced their legacy plan for the FIFA World Cup in 2023. There are four pou (pillars); Whakamana (power of opportunities), Ara (pathways), Mana Ngātahi (partnerships), and Tiaki (people and places). It’s an impressive document and I look forward to watching it come to life.
The National Women’s Soccer League in the United States has been hit by more allegations of bullying by a coach, the fifth male NWSL coach to be accused of misconduct this year. In this case, players from the Chicago Red Stars first spoke up in 2014, and then again in 2018 which led to a review by U.S. Soccer, but despite the national body interviewing some players (and ignoring others who wanted to be interviewed), nothing happened. Rory Dames resigned earlier this week as the longest serving coach in the NWSL, hours before the story broke in The Washington Post. Allegations include that he used his power and status as the coach to manipulate players and get close to them. One player said she was terrified to speak up, but did so, and then “was made to feel by U.S. Soccer that I was in the wrong, there was nothing to report, and that this was acceptable.” Dames also controlled the “trading”, where players are moved between clubs, adding to his power over the players. One player said “He asserts control like you’re a little girl, not an adult woman — when you can go out to a concert, when you can say something or you can’t say something, when you can see your family. It felt like it’s a disrespect that is related to gender.”
As author and activist Glennon Doyle tweeted this week, “If you can’t stop hiring men to coach women maybe consider not hiring men who hate women to coach women.”
Moments after sending my email last week, there was a furore on social media with the announcement that Tim Paine had resigned as captain of the Australian cricket team after it emerged he had sent unsolicited photos of his naked self to a woman who worked at Cricket Tasmania. There were two issues for me, the first was that this happened in 2017 and Cricket Australia have known about it since 2018. Cricket Tasmania investigated it at the time and somehow concluded that sexually harassing a colleague doesn’t contravene their code of conduct, so no action was taken against Paine. In fact, Cricket Australia went on to make him captain of the national team. CA have since come out to say if this had happened today, he’d be gone. Hindsight and all that. Second, the headlines across Australian media called it a “sexting scandal”. No. Sexting is when two people consensually share sexual messages. When someone receives unwelcome and unwanted sexually explicit messages, that is sexual harassment. In a bizarre move, Cricket Tasmania have come out swinging against Cricket Australia, apparently appalled at how the national body have treated Tim Paine. This is Cricket Tasmania who accused the woman who received the unwanted messages of theft around the same time as the sexual harassment. She has denied the allegations and the case is still pending trial. I wrote my thoughts on this before reading Stuff’s Zoe George’s op ed on this situation (honest!) but I highly recommend reading Zoe’s piece, as she explains even further all the things wrong with this situation.
On the topic of inappropriate conduct in the workplace, an interesting 24 hours or so for the National Party this week with now former-party leader Judith Collins announcing on Wednesday night that Simon Bridges was being demoted for inappropriate comments he made to MP Jacqui Dean in 2017. Dean called Bridges out at the time to then-deputy leader Bill English, and Bridges apologised. Stuff’s Kirsty Johnson wrote a great article about those moments familiar to a lot of women, when you’re at work or at drinks or even a Zoom these days, and some guy makes a “joke” at the expense of women. It’s not funny, but the lads around him laugh, usually a bit nervously, glancing at you to see how you react (like with receiving unwanted sexually explicit photos, I can describe this from first hand experience). As Kirsty points out, we tend to have three options here, laugh with the lads to try and stay in the group, roll your eyes and walk away, or call them out – either formally to your boss or to their face on the spot. A confession, in the past I have usually opted for option 1. But as I get older or maybe wiser or at least fiercer, or maybe just more tired, polite smiles are becoming a thing of the past.
Speaking of tired, research out of Australia this week has found that half of men in business are “fatigued” of the notion of gender equality, and feel they are now being discriminated against with women being favoured for promotions and jobs on the basis of their gender. Uhhh welcome to our world! I’m very fatigued to still have to be talking about gender equality too. But if we need a reminder about why gender equality is still an important issue, we can look at the news this week thanks to Tim Paine, Simon Bridges and Rory Dames. And World Athletics released data this week that shows women faced 87% of social media abuse at the Tokyo Olympics. That’s why gender equality is still an issue.
This week in herstory, the Human Rights Act was introduced in 1977, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender or marital status. And this time last year it was announced the government was investing $2m in cricket facilities upgrades in Wellington, to strive for gender equality with toilets.
Check out all the key media headlines in women’s sport for the week of 26th November right here.
Alida Shanks 