How school sports day is still failing girls
The unconscious bias of track and field events
This week I was planning to write about something entirely different. Something uplifting. Something celebrating the power of running. But instead I found myself trackside, drowning inside while a sea of yellow, green, blue and red shirts shrieked around me. Secondary school sports day.
As I sat in the stands listening to a teacher holding court on the tannoy, teenagers buzzed passed me clutching oversized bags of Haribo, their faces gleaming with sweat and/or glitter. Excited girls sprawled on each other’s shirts, while the boys snuck off to play football in a hidden corner of the track.
It was a gorgeous summer’s day - hot but not to hot - and four houses were competing to be the champions of 2025.
At first it seemed an idyllic setting. These children had all put themselves forward to compete, there was no forced participation. They were basking in the satisfaction of missing a whole day of school and relishing the healthy competition.
But gradually I started to notice something, an unconscious bias that seeped throughout the entire event, like an invisible forcefield that no-one could see but me.
As much as it seemed like it on the surface, this was not an event of gender equity.
Firstly I couldn’t help but notice the language being used by the overzealous tannoy announcer. It was laced with gender stereotypes without the teacher (who was female) even realising it. The boys were told not to act “cool and hard” and to stop “over doing it” in their warm-ups. The emphasis was clearly on the physical and the masculine.
Meanwhile, whenever she referred to the girls it was to warn them to “put on sun cream” or to chastise them for “social chat”, very much leaning into feminine stereotypes of health and sociability.
I also noticed it in the behaviour of the boys. While they were warming up, many of them were indeed “over doing it”, racing each other around the track. Meanwhile the girls chatted causally while doing a steady warm-up lap. The gender split was remarkable. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with this - it was just strikingly obvious.
It was also clear as day that women still take on the vast majority of caring responsibilities. Amongst all the parents that were there to watch, around 80% were female. And of the men in attendance many of them appeared to be grandfathers.
But the most glaring unconscious bias on display was the order of events. In every single race the boys ran before the girls. Every. Single. One. When I raised this with my son he shrugged and said it was “just tradition” and that girls ran first in cross country. But it felt like something far more insidious. It sent the implicit message that the boys’ races held more weight than the girls’. That the boys were the priority. The boys were number one on the billing. That boys in sport were always first in the pecking order.
Some may argue that I am hypersensitive having spent 18 months researching a book about sexism in sport. And maybe I am. My friend’s daughter rolled her eyes when asked what she felt about the boys going first, “it’s no big deal,” she countered. Before going on to say that all out-of-school competitions raced the boys first, so she was used to it.
But just because something is traditional or has always been done a certain way, doesn’t make it right. Why can’t we, and why shouldn’t we, alternate the order in which girls and boys race?
It’s only when we start making conscious steps to change the way we do things that we will make any headway towards equity in sport.
Girls drop out of sport in far greater numbers than boys, and far less women exercise than men. We have a problem in sport and we need to do things differently. Girls need to feel a sense of belonging rather than always being in the shadow of boys.
Do you agree? Or am I overthinking it? I’d love to hear your views!
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. Send feedback to lilycanter@yahoo.co.uk or suggest topics you’d like me to cover.
I hope you’re able to share this with the school-maybe they’ll invite you to talk to teachers and pupils.
Lily’s insightful ethnographic observations complements a library load of social research which reveals these unconscious processes. So sad the female teachers take them for granted too.