Call for women's sports awards

A special women's sports awards scheme and an Irish women's sports foundation should be introduced to encourage female participation in sports, an Oireachtas committee has recommended.

Awards for female athletes only would highlight the achievements of sportswomen at local, regional and national level, an Oireachtas committee report on women in sport has said.

Almost 50 per cent fewer women than men participate in sport, according to figures from the Irish Sports Council (ISC). Other research found that more than 90 per cent of sports photographs in Irish newspapers were of men, while female athletes accounted for less than 3 per cent of pictures.

"In researching this report, I was very disturbed by the skewed nature of sports coverage in newspapers," Fine Gael sport spokesman, Mr Jimmy Deenihan, said. "A lot of the time you would be hard-pressed to find a female face in the sports pages and the statistics bear this out."

Mr Deenihan was launching the committee's report yesterday at a Women in Sport conference in Croke Park, Dublin. Women were being marginalised by current sports policy and a "radical shift" was needed to tackle their low participation rates, he said. "We need to determine the level of involvement of women and girls in physical education at school and college. This should form part of a new commission on physical education."

The committee has recommended that the Government and the ISC should consider extra funding for female involvement in sport; should examine the media coverage of women in sport; and should raise the profile of the health benefits of sport, with particular reference to osteoporosis.

"Regular exercise beginning in childhood and carried on through adolescence and adulthood helps prevent osteoporosis," Dr Catherine Woods, a sport science academic at Dublin City University, told the conference. Girls who have not taken part in sport by the age of 10 have only a one in 10 chance of participating in sport by the age of 25.

"Women and girls who participate in regular exercise suffer lower rates of depression," Dr Woods said.