Gender quotas for sporting boards an odd fight to pick

Good headline, Minister. “Put women in power or lose funding.” Not bad for a quiet Monday morning.

And on the face of it, where could there be found a problem with decreeing that women make up at least 30 per cent of the boards of sporting bodies across the land?

In fairness, it was a fine headline too for the sports minister of the Australian state of Victoria this time last year when he came up with a similar brainwave. He plumped for 40 per cent representation, but there’s no point splitting hairs.

“People can say what they like, 51 per cent of the population are women,” John Eren squawked when he announced the initiative.

“People need to make an effort and stop making excuses. Some people say if it’s not broke, why fix it? Well, I say it is broke.”

That was in December 2015.

Spin the tape on a few weeks to the end of February 2016 and it turned out Eren had been convinced somewhere along the way that things maybe weren’t all that broke after all.

A measure that was supposed to apply to the state’s eight AFL clubs, to the Melbourne Storm rugby league club and to teams in both the VFL and FFA was watered down at a stroke.

It would now be applied to local community clubs only.

Now, Minister of State Patrick O’Donovan way well be entirely pure of heart here. The battle for recognition and parity of esteem for women in sport can always use an extra pair of hands and it ill-behoves any of us to pooh-pooh a willing volunteer. Godspeed in your endeavours, we say.

Corporate boards

Just a few things to keep in mind along the way, though. Not that a single step matters very much when the journey is so long but the widely-quoted figure of the big three sports bodies having no female representation at the moment is incorrect. Not by much, but incorrect all the same.

The IRFU committee appointed Mary Quinn in October 2015, thus ending a 137-year stretch with no female representation at the top of the union.

The FAI recently merged with the WFAI. As part of the merger they have commited to appointing a female member to the board in the next 12 months and that there will always be at least one female board member from here on out.

Obviously, one apiece is nothing to be getting excited about but it’s no harm to know where we are starting from.

As well, it’s probably worth demystifying the notion of what these boards are. The vast majority of people on them, male and female, are volunteers.

It would be wrong to imagine these as the equivalent of corporate boards, peopled by flashers of vast expense accounts and hoarders of frequent flier miles. Most of them, frankly, are doing it because nobody else put up their hand at the agm.

So let’s not make out that female representation on boards is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow here. Yes, it is pitifully low in a lot of cases and yes, it should be increased.

But when there is so much other work to do in so many areas of women’s relationship with sport, this seems like an oddly obscure fight to pick.

Glass ceiling

Truth is, not one little girl will pick up a ball, a hurley, a pair of runners or a swimsuit because more women are put on the boards of sporting organisations. Gender quotas might cause a fuss for a while – and there’s nothing wrong with that, obviously – but long term, it’s hard to be confident of their effectiveness.

“I certainly want more women and girls involved in every aspect of sport,” Mary Quinn told The Irish Times in February.

“I would encourage women and girls to experience sport at every level so that by the time they reach whatever committee they’re on, they can contribute straight away.

“I think, though, that you have to be careful about the transfer of knowledge. Gender quotas could result in people being shoehorned into roles where they feel uncomfortable or out of their depth. You have to empower people to contribute their ideas, you have to support them and encourage them and not burn them out.

“Yes, if you find that you’re up against some kind of really sexist glass ceiling, then by all means start considering quotas. But if something is already happening and it’s developing at a good pace and you’re getting more and more people in who are wowing people with their contributions, then it’s better to let it grow organically.”

Earlier this year, when Sport Ireland announced its latest funding round, the contribution under the heading Women In Sport stayed the same overall at €600,000.

“The Women In Sport programme aims to raise the overall physical activity levels among women and to support women’s roles within sports organisations,” ran the accompanying blurb.

Six hundred grand in an overall package of sports funding that ran to €10.86m is a depressingly tiny amount. That said, it’s actually an improvement on 2015, when the total came to €599,950.

Yes, our Government upped the funding for raising physical activity levels among women by a measly 50 quid, year-on-year.

Sport works from the bottom up, not the top-down. Surely it would be more in the minister’s line to square away funds to get more women involved at grassroots level and, as Mary Quinn suggests, grow the thing organically.

But then that wouldn’t make much of a headline, would it?

It took two months for John Eren to lose his ardour for this idea. Let’s see how long Patrick O’Donovan lasts.