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 do not employ enough women in senior positions. A 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 stipulates that board membership must be at least 30% 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% 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 to prove to Sport England and UK Sport that they can reach the 30% target within the next 12 to 18 months. “It is great that the government finally adopted the 30% target but it remains to be seen how it is implemented,” said the Women in Sport CEO, Ruth Holdaway. “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. 30% 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% of society, you need to be accountable for that.”
Nine of the 68 sports surveyed employ no women whatsoever in senior leadership positions outside that of chief executive. The figure for the FA is 31% but it still has one of the least diverse boards in English sport. It currently has one female member on its 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% target, which was introduced in November. A key problem is that the target in effect requires “men to vote themselves off the board” and that “there’s a lot of vested self-interest” at work. “People are hanging on and you have to question whether they are doing it for the good of their sport. Because the evidence from business is very clear: gender diversity on boards makes for better decision-making. So why would you not want to change your organisation to make it more diverse?”
The 30% target is just one of the criteria included in the new code, which aims to increase transparency, accountability and diversity in sports governance. Lord Ouseley, chairman of Kick It Out, said on Monday that “by prioritising women on boards all other protected groups are being left behind. It is quite right for women to be progressing but these reforms need to be across the board and not just directed at women.”
Holdaway said: “There is no reason why by having a more gender diverse board the FA can’t also have a more ethnically diverse board. If they’re changing their recruitment practices as well as changing the structure of the board they have an opportunity to think about how they attract different types of people into their leadership. This is the first step in the process for the FA. It shouldn’t be the end point.”
The CEO of UK Sport, Liz Nicholl, said she was “pleased to see” that sports were starting to “engage” with the 30% target but acknowledged “that more could and should be done in this area”. The report found that the number of women in senior leadership positions across all the sports surveyed had actually fallen from 42% in 2014 to 36% in 2017 and that women are especially under-employed as both chief executives and performance directors. “We have a good number of women in development director roles but not as CEOs and not as PDs,” said Holdaway. “There is clearly gender stereotyping going on around the type of work women do.”
Holdaway acknowledged that “there has been rapid change in recent years” but feedback gathered by Women in Sport in interviews with administrators who had moved into sport from other fields revealed “that without exception their experience was that sport lags behind other sectors in terms of its acknowledgment of the need to have specific development opportunities for women”. Holdaway said governing bodies “now need to develop a pipeline for women to move into leadership roles” rather than just look to parachute them into boards.
Holdaway said: “I’m very confident that the target will contribute towards shifting the culture of the sports sector but we want to see the governing bodies tackle the difficult issues, the structural issues that are hard to address.”
Women in Sport is pushing for governing bodies to introduce fixed term limits for board members, remove honorary board member status to ensure more opportunities are available and adopt flexible working practices including job-shares and part-time hours.
While many of the governing bodies are still struggling to meet this initial 30% target, Women In Sport is already looking to push on beyond it.
