A funny thing happened at a recent ‘women in sport’ conference in Dublin. . .not one person attacked the ‘mejia’ from the floor!
As a sportswriter it is usually wise to attend these events incognito, so this unprecedented development was enough to prompt me to whip off my false moustache and utter a polite “yahoo”.
Such conferences, however worthy, are often talking shops with few practical outcomes. When the debate is finally distilled to that single, key question – how to practically change things – the dreaded ‘mejia’ is usually rounded upon as the source of all ills.
Competitive women’s sport has a myriad of problems – high drop-out rates, small percentages of female coaches and administrators, tiny audiences and an inequity of sponsorship, pay and esteem.
Its advocates cite that great feminist adage: ‘If you can’t see it you can’t be it!’ and blame most of those problems on one obvious culprit.
Media fish. Barrel. Splattered usually.
So to notice us avoiding the usual machine-gunning seemed to confirm that 2016 was better.
For a start sports themselves have got a lot more proactive about publicity.
Camogie and ladies’ football, and their innovative independent players’ union (the WGPA), now commission coverage (written and video) for their own websites and even give free content to mainstream media.
The IRFU and FAI, whose women’s programme are infants in comparison, are following suit.
Live streaming
Key women’s events may not all be live on TV yet but live streaming now offers a new visual platform.
You can argue such initiatives shouldn’t be necessary but, like all ‘minority sport’, if you haven’t yet got the critical audience mass to persuade the mainstream media to cover you, then, in this age of social media wizardry, taking things into your hands is the proper response.
With social media came opportunities to stop whingeing and get doing. Some of the change has come from ‘new media’. There’s now two Irish ‘women in sport’ (#WIS) podcasts and several dedicated websites.
Sponsors are also finally cottoning on to the potential.
Note how many commercials now feature girls/women playing sport, and how some GAA county sponsors now cover both men’s and women’s teams and feature players from both at their launches?
It is four years since a company first jointly sponsored the All-Ireland hurling and camogie championships. Their recent replacement has just gone further by including camogie’s national league.
That Lidl’s ladies’ Gaelic football sponsorship, which needs no explanation here, proves just what a global ground-breaker it was in 2016. You literally couldn’t miss it, and apart from TV and billboard ads, they also commissioned online content and in-store promotions.
2016 was the first time RTÉ televised the All-Ireland camogie semi-finals live (rewarded with two extra-time belters) and also the Womens’ World Boxing Championships (TG4 had the rights in 2014).
On top of its long-running Women in Sport awards (in partnership with Sport Ireland), this newspaper stuck its neck out also in 2016 by setting aside space exclusively for women’s sport every Thursday.
Bidding war
That mirrors recent cross-channel innovations like Sky Sports' weekly Sportswomen programme, BBC's Women's Football Show and BT's Action Woman series.
This year there was actually a bidding war in Britain for the live TV rights for women’s soccer’s 2017 European Championships which Channel 4 won.
The first stand-alone women’s Big Bash T20 cricket match was broadcast on free-to-air Australian primetime last weekend and netted 386,000 viewers.
This was also the year that, not one, but three books by and about women made the Guardian’s ‘best sportsbooks of the year’ list in Britain.
It was also the year that women’s GAA players got a form of Government grants, thanks to the WGPA’s collaboration with their sports’ governing bodies.
That recent WIS conference, coincidentally, was also where junior minister Patrick O’Donovan first flagged his intent to try to enforce a 30per cent ratio of women on the boards of sporting bodies, a radical idea which prompted massive debate this week.
But debate is forever hot air if behaviour doesn’t change.
When the IRFU hosted a major women’s Sevens International event in UCD in 2015 it provided no programmes.
This year it hosted the first women’s 15s Autumn internationals, brought the world’s top three teams to Belfield and provided programmes free. Yay!
Yet Ireland’s games, well flagged in newspapers and with just a€5 entry (kids free), all attracted crowds of less than 2,000. Boo!
Public interest
This year was the fourth year that the women’s FAI Cup final, televised live, was played as a double-header with the men’s final in the Aviva. Yay!
The match programme devoted just seven of its 50 pages to the women’s game. Boo!
Yet that reflected public interest. A crowd of 26,400 watched the men but only around 5per cent of that (1,400) came early to watch the women. Hiss, boo!
So 2016 marked considerable progress but more is needed.
The critics are right. If you can’t see it it’s hard to be it, or appreciate it, but it’s not just the media and sponsors who must change.
It’s also about altering attitudes and behaviour in families, in schools, in governing bodies and government.
A year ago I resolved to attend at least one women’s sports event a month in 2016.
Some months I made several, some I made none. Insert suitable emoji here for my pathetic history of broken New Year’s resolutions.
Yet making that one still made me attend far more women’s sports events than usual in 2016.
Whenever possible I towed along a friend, male or female. The skill levels varied (just like all sport) but I was never bored and often delighted.
I’ll endeavour to do the same in 2017, for all domestic women’s events and the rugby World Cup and basketball’s European under-18 Championships, both of which Ireland host next August.
There’s proper momentum now. Let’s keep it going. Think global – act local.
