By Kath Gelber
When the Australian women's cricket team travelled to New Zealand recently to compete in an international event, the only reason we got to hear about it was because a cricketer left out of the one-day team claimed that she had been excluded because she is heterosexual. The Denise Arnetts incident did provide some visibility to women's sport, but at what price?
Angela Burroughs, who lectures in sport and society at the University of New South Wales, spoke to Green Left Weekly about the implications of the Arnetts case and about issues facing women in sport more generally.
She pointed out that this particular case highlighted broader problems of participation and representation. While the incident could have provided an opportunity for a breakthrough on these issues, the handling of it only exacerbated an already problematic situation.
Women's participation in organised sport is a growing concern. Government-sponsored campaigns such as the 1992-94 Australian Women in Sport and Recreation Strategy have sought to encourage the participation of women in organised sport, particularly targeting women in their late teens.
Research supports anecdotal evidence that up to the age of 12 or 14 the participation rates of girls in organised sport are similar to those of boys, but from this age on a significant dropping out of girls occurs.
A Sports Participation Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Victoria in October 1989 found that 33% of women had participated at least once in a sporting activity in the previous year, compared to 51% of men. In all age groups, women were less likely than men to have participated in sport.
Women who had been born in Australia were three times more likely to have participated in a sporting activity than women born in a non-English speaking country: 39% compared to 13%. Those women who did participate spent 22% less time on sporting activities than men.
The reasons for women's lower participation include the responsibility borne by women for unpaid domestic and caring tasks, lack of confidence, lack of time, lack of child-care, believing they were too old and believing they were not physically able.
In high profile sports, women's representation is relatively low. Participation rates in the Australian Olympic team were 12% in 1948 and 28% in 1992, although at 9 of the 12 Olympics since 1948, the proportion of medals won by Australia's female athletes has exceeded their proportional representation on the teams.
Of the 91 members of the International Olympic Committee in 1993, only seven were women.
Media coverage is sparse and stereotyped. Research commissioned by the Australian Sports Commission in 1992 included the following findings:
- In 1980 women's sport received 2% of total sports coverage, in 1988, 2.5% and in 1992, 4.2%.
- In 1988 women's sport occupied, on average, 0.9% of the total time allocated to sports coverage by five metropolitan television stations. In 1992 the equivalent figure was 1.2%.
In Europe it is estimated that no more than 5% of television sports coverage is devoted to women's sports.
Yet the Denise Arnetts case achieved notoriety overnight. The incident provoked the largest amount of coverage of women's cricket ever, although the team have been world champions for years. The coverage was inaccurate and loaded. For example, the team that was picked for the New Zealand international competition was only a one-day team: Arnetts' exclusion from this team had no bearing on her inclusion in further selections.
According to Burroughs, the distorted coverage has the potential to damage further women's participation in sport. Girls entering non-traditional sport can be taunted with the accusation that they "must be a lesbian", and their parents may harbour homophobic fears about the effects of team members who may be lesbians on their daughters.
Burroughs expressed disappointment that sports organisations hadn't taken up the case to do something positive for lesbians and gay men in sport. The issue provided an opportunity to look into the practices of sports organisations and the potential for discrimination on the basis of homosexuality. Rather than being pursued, this was pushed underground; commentators on national media referred to "the case" and Arnetts' proclaimed heterosexuality without mentioning the terms lesbian, gay or homosexual.
As Burroughs points out, sexuality shouldn't be an issue in sport, but it is. Devices exist to project a certain image of women in sport.
The uniforms worn by women are one example, projecting a "heterosexy" image. The recent Hollywood film A League of Their Own exploited this angle heavily. Women are not interviewed straight after a game, when they are hot and sweaty, but are expected to shower and put on make-up first. Maintaining an "acceptable" image of women in sport means hiding the existence and participation of lesbians.
In the wake of the Arnetts case, there have been calls to review the Anti-Discrimination Act in order to guard against potential discrimination against heterosexuals. However, the entire philosophy of the Anti-Discrimination Act is to protect those sectors of society which have been systematically discriminated against, such as women, people of colour, lesbians and gay men. To propose to protect heterosexuals against discrimination could dilute the content of the act to a degree that would make it worthless.
The most useful approach would be to encourage equal participation of women and men in sport for reasons such as maintaining their health and enjoying recreational pursuits, regardless of their sexuality. Unfortunately, we're a long way from that.