This week, two sporting clubs in Melbourne’s east gave us a masterclass in how women and girls are still treated as an afterthought in sport.
One was golf, the other was soccer. One involved grown women being turned out of a boardroom, while the other involved 11- and 12-year-old girls turned off a field. Different problems and generations but still, a similar thread.
In Oakleigh on July 12, an under-12 girls’ soccer match being played for points, between the Boroondara Eagles and Monash City Villarreal was halted 40 minutes in so an under-11 boys’ friendly game, could use the field.
The girls were sent to an alternative pitch that was, by the Eagles’ account, waterlogged and unsafe. The match was abandoned. One of the club’s young female coaches reportedly left the ground in tears. Monash City Villarreal disputes that gender had anything to do with it, saying the real problem was a waterlogged pitch and an organisational failure as officials tried to save every fixture on a difficult morning.
Football Victoria is now investigating through its Member Protection process. But a father watching his daughter play put it simply: “try to imagine the reverse happening to a boys’ team”. Most of us can’t, because it doesn’t happen. The girls were already on the field, playing the match they had turned up for, and somehow it was still their game that got treated as the one that could be paused.
Across town, something even more telling was unfolding in a golf clubhouse. Camberwell Golf Club and Camberwell Ladies Golf Club, previously separate clubs of 230 men and 70 women who shared the same council-owned course, recently merged into one.
This week, every single woman on the new club’s general committee, including the former ladies’ club president Sue Trick, secretary Julia Trafford, and members Lynne O’Brien and Jill Douglas (pictured above), was told by club president Craig Atkins that their appointments were ‘invalid’. All four walked out of the meeting. Some were left distressed. The committee that remained had 13 male members on it and not one woman.
Ironically, minutes before the women were removed, Golf Australia’s head of governance had just finished an hour-long presentation to the club about modern governance, including the importance of gender representation on boards. Atkins says the women’s appointments breached a technical error in the club’s constitution and has called the whole affair “a storm in a teacup”. Trafford sees it differently, describing it as a stitch-up and saying the club’s women had been ambushed by their own president.
Golf Australia’s general manager said boards must reflect the membership they serve and called that principle non-negotiable. Golf Australia says it had specifically advised Camberwell to modernise its constitution and guarantee meaningful representation of women as the two clubs came together, in line with national sports governance standards and Victoria’s own Balance the Board policy. They went on to say that “removing women from a governance structure at the very moment a club is being asked to strengthen female representation is indefensible”.
These two stories show what patriarchal structures in sport look like in 2026.
The girls’ game gets the worse field, while the women’s committee gets voted off the board on a technicality, hours after being lectured about the importance of including them. None of it requires anyone to be a villain. It just requires everyone to keep doing what has always been done, and to call it a “storm in a teacup” when women or girls object.
And here is what frustrates me most. While these very real and ordinary inequities keep playing out on suburban ovals and in golf club boardrooms, so much public energy gets poured into manufactured panic about trans women in sport, as though that is the great threat facing women’s participation.
It isn’t.
The threat facing an 11-year-old girl who just wants to finish her match is a system that treats her as secondary. The threat facing a 70 member women’s golf club is a merger that quietly wipes out their own committee positions in a single meeting.
If we are genuinely worried about fairness for women and girls in sport, this is where the worry belongs, not in a culture war that conveniently distracts from the duller, much more widespread problem of girls and women being pushed to the back of the room.