UK sports bodies face cuts over lack of women in senior roles

The Football Association, the Rugby Football Union and the England and Wales Cricket Board are at risk of losing government support and public funding because they don't employ enough women in senior positions. A new report released by the charity Women in Sport reveals the three organisations are all failing to meet criteria set out in the new code for sports governance, which stipulate that board membership must be at least 30 per cent female.

The report found that 33 of the 68 national governing bodies that receive funds from UK Sport and Sport England do not meet the 30 per cent target. British Cycling, the Amateur Swimming Association, the Rugby Football League, and the British Paralympic Association are also at risk.

All these governing bodies will now have prove to Sport England and UK Sport that they can reach the 30 per cent target within the next 12 to 18 months. "It is great that the government finally adopted the 30 per cent target, but it remains to be seen how it is implemented," said the Women in Sport chief executive Ruth Holdaway.

Accountable

“If we do this survey again in two years’ time and find that some of these sports haven’t shifted, that won’t be good enough. Thirty per cent is not a new figure. We’ve known about it for a long time, and we’ve been calling for it for a long time. So we want to see rapid change. If you’re in receipt of public funds and you’re not representing 50 per cent of society, you need to be accountable for that.”

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Nine of the 68 sports surveyed employ no women in senior leadership positions outside of the chief executive. The figure for the FA is 31 per cent, but they still have one of the least diverse boards in English sport. They currently have one female member on their 12-person board. The RFU and the ECB both have two female board members. The FA board announced on Monday that it has agreed to reserve three places for women from 2018 onwards, but the proposal still has to be approved by the FA council. The council has 122 members and 114 of them are men.

“There is a problem in sport,” said Holdaway. “Clearly there is sexism in this sector. There are structures and practices that are making it difficult for women to reach leadership roles, and in my book that means women are being discriminated against.”

Holdaway believes there are some “very deep-rooted structural reasons” why certain governing bodies were struggling to meet the 30 per cent target, which was introduced in November. A key problem is that the target effectively requires “men to vote themselves off the board” and that “there’s a lot of vested self-interest” at work.