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A significant number of girls stop playing sports competitively in puberty and adolescence.
Athleticism and sports talents already have a track record of being one of the most utilized paths to access higher education. Many professional athletes obtained a university education and career thanks to educational institutions creating opportunities through athletic teams that award scholarships or financial support. Some graduates may not have pursued a sports career but obtained their academic degrees thanks to their various physical disciplines.
The benefits of playing sports from an early age are undeniable. Besides, when a student has sufficient skills to develop professionally in the discipline they choose, they can ensure better educational and subsequent work opportunities. If sports is such a good platform for physical and socioemotional development, integration, socialization, and even building a career, why are there so few mechanisms for the growth of women’s sports at the school level?
In Australia, two-thirds of the female adolescent students report that participating in sports activities generates self-confidence; however, half leave sports by age seventeen. Canada presents a case of a continuous decrease in women’s sports participation in schools. In this context, if a girl has not participated in physical disciplines by the time she is ten years old, the chances of her getting involved in some sports during high school and undergraduate education is only 10%. In Mexico, female professional athletes who managed to break the gender barrier in a sport as complicated as women’s football (soccer) frequently share stories about beginning their athletics on boys’ teams as children and youth because female sports’ opportunities did not exist.
“They put me in my brother’s club. It was a boys’ team because back then, there was nothing for girls,” said Katty Martinez, the forward for the women’s Tigres team and goal scorer of the BBVA MX Women’s League tournament for Grupo Reforma in November last year. Other figures from Mexican women’s soccer like Belén Cruz, Rebeca Bernal, and Alison González have spoken to different media about their experiences, ranging from playing on male circuits for a while to persevering in the practice of sports even though their families disapproved at first.
There is a disconnect between developmental spaces for women’s sports and the educational opportunities generated for women. By the time female students with athletic abilities reach the age to apply for a sports scholarship, many of them have stopped practicing the sport at the level that would allow them to enroll in a higher education institution. The causes of this are not limited to structural problems; it is also a gender issue.
When gender plays against you
In previous articles, we talked about the importance of an education that includes gender perspective. This is especially necessary when it comes to physical education. During the ages that boys and girls play children’s sports, it is easier to create a safe environment where the motor, cognitive, and socio-emotional development provided by sports can occur without additional complications. However, this situation changes for female students when they reach puberty.
Physical and physiological changes, psychological effects, social standards, and normalized judgments about the female body enter the equation in this stage. The impact of these new aspects adds a significant burden to young female athletes. Without a support structure to process these additional challenges and ensure their tenure in physical disciplines, girls begin to leave sports at puberty. As they grow, this proportion of sports abandonment climbs higher.
The need for gender-sensitive sports education and development spaces for women’s sports is critical. What is being done to ensure that girls stay in sports activities?
How to turn around the lack of opportunities?
Around the world, there are various initiatives to incentivize women’s sports. Foundations such as Street Games in the United Kingdom or the Women’s Sports Foundation in the United States propose fundraising models to support the growth of girls’ and women’s sports. These projects are an excellent start toward raising visibility and supporting physical disciplines for young women and girls of school age. However, they are somewhat isolated circuits more than pieces of a concrete structure to promote and support women’s sports.
To ensure that educational opportunities for girls and women with athletic interests increase, one must work through the networks of those who play the sport, those who make it possible, those who fund it, and those who promote it. The notion that sports management bodies need this connective weave is not new, but such channels have not been built in the women’s sports sphere.
This gap opens opportunities for new proposals with the purpose not just to fund or support single programs but, instead, establish connections among the athletes, access to the sports, and, subsequently, to the education and job opportunities that sports can provide.
The initiative “Dale la Vuelta” -Turn it Around in English- created by Brenda Möller, a digital strategist having a Master’s in International Sports Management from the European Sports Business School, is one of the most relevant plays in women’s sports management, with Mexico as a starting point. The project began as a platform to promote and inspire the practice of sports by women and girls. As a second phase, last December 1, they launched a call to create a directory of contacts among amateur children-and-youth-level athletes, recruiting teams and institutions, and the technical, medical, and administrative staff a team would need to complete their ranks.
“The purpose of this directory is to be a meeting point, open to all sports,” Möller comme
nted to the Observatory of Educational Innovation. She emphasized the value of boosting women’s sports at the amateur level, highlighting the positive role sports can have for young girls passing into puberty and adolescence. When they need a safe space to help them strengthen their self-confidence as they go through the physical changes of that age is precisely when they lose it, either because of a lack of infrastructure or social limitations linked to their gender, Möller argued.
The real purpose of the convocation by Dale La Vuelta is to provide that space for full physical, psychological, and social development that should be part of female students’ and athletes’ education as much as their male counterparts. So far, the call has received 200 registrations, most being teams. “The project was very well received from the beginning, filling a hole that no one was tending,” added Möller about the convocation, which in February this year will open a comprehensive portal focused on products and services for women’s sports. She also explained that the sports’ educational dimension is not reduced to the procurement of scholarships or academic degrees, especially in the women’s sphere. Many women’s leagues and competitive events are not sufficiently developed to provide economic and workforce stability to their athletes. In this context, sports are opportunities not only for us to learn how to live together, socialize, and compete with others but to be ourselves while we do it.
Do you think physical education and sports opportunities for girls and women are scarce, and more are needed? What are you doing in the school classroom and playground to teach gender-sensitive physical education? Tell us in the comments.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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