After a damning report revealed how women in the AFL have felt professionally stunted in all areas of the industry due to their sex, the AFL has committed itself to rectifying the situation.
The AFL’s only female board member, Dorothy Hisgrove, told Fairfax Media she raised the prospect of the AFL and club leaders signing a charter that would commit them to achieving tangible change on gender.
While not providing any evidence to show that the AFL will be taking on any new measures to fight the culture, Ms Hisgrove says the AFL won’t be paying lip service to the matter.
The ‘Gender Equity: What Will It Take To Be The Best’ report, commissioned by the Australian Sports Commission, Richmond football club and the AFL concluded that a pervasive “blokey culture” continued to impede women working in the game.
The report interviewed 60 men and women working in the industry, who showed quite differing views on how to solve the gender bias.
“On the whole, men approached the discussion from the perspective of how to assist women to ‘fit in’ to the existing environment, rather than how to change that environment,” the report said.
Change was found to be “glacially slow” with women with children the worst affected by the culture.
One woman said she felt written off in the workplace after a male colleague characterised her as a “groupie”.Although the culture has improved, the report found that the sexism that exists now is more ingrained.
“The AFL game has moved beyond overt, blatant sexism on most counts, and what pervades today is something much more subtle, nuanced and culturally ingrained, but deeply felt, widely experienced and prohibitive to women’s progress nevertheless,” the report found.
Women fill only 22 of the 148 club board positions at the AFL. Forty-four per cent of AFL fans are women.
Source: Fairfax Media