My parents tell me all the time that as kids they spent their time on the streets playing soccer and hopscotch, but children nowadays stay in all day surfing the internet and being extremely lazy.
They may be right. According to a 2009 survey by Health Canada, only four per cent of girls between the ages of five and 17 are meeting the suggested 60 minutes of physical exercise each day. Only nine per cent of boys are exercising enough.
Rachel C. Colley, a researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, says she thinks that lack of physical activity among girls is the result of an unenthusiastic approach to sports offered in schools.
How to get females involved in sports is a question the Canadian government has been trying to tackle. The 1995 Federal Plan for Gender Equality was created with an eye towards women being given the same rights and quality of life as men. A main objective of the plan is to improve women’s physical well-being by creating a health strategy that acknowledged the importance of various practices including an involvement in sports.
GPI Atlantic, a non-profit research and education firm, published a report in 2003 titled, “A Profile of Women’s Health Indicators in Canada,” aimed at examining how well the government’s 1995 plan had faired.
The report said a person’s health could be affected by “social, cultural, economic and personal determinants of health,” and stressed the social problem of inequality as a barrier against women in sports.
Lizzie Armistead, an Olympic silver medallist in bicycle road racing at this year’s London Olympics, used her platform as a successful athlete to speak about this problem to the Huffington Post in July. She called on other women to help conquer a biased sports environment.
“Obviously if we join together, we’ve got a stronger stance and I think it’s something we do need to do,” she said.
Hockey is a prime example of a women’s sport in Canada standing in the shadow of its male counterpart. For example, men’s hockey made its Olympic debut in the 1920 Games in Antwerp, Belgium, but women’s hockey didn’t appear at the Olympics until 1994. Had women’s hockey been given such visibility earlier, young girls would have had more athletes to look up to and emulate.
Women’s football is another sport suffering from a lack of fulsome coverage. There is the Lingerie Football League, but what message are we sending to budding athletes by displaying half-dressed women play full-contact football?
As a youngster, I was a swimmer. I started off confident but after placing second in a mixed final, I was with my first sexist remark. "Boys are better than girls," said my instructor.
I was eight years old. I lost my competitiveness. Regrettably, I quit soon after. Had I stuck it out, could I have been one of the role models clearly needed in female sports? Maybe, maybe not. But by quitting, I realize I’ve been part of the problem.