Women physiotherapists and doctors working in elite and professional sport are paid less, get less work and face more harassment than men, an Australian-first study by La Trobe University has found.
Published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the study surveyed 223 people (68 per cent were physiotherapists and 61 per cent worked in elite sport).
There were almost an equal number of men and women, and it’s the first comprehensive study of women’s experiences in the field.
“It’s hard to be a woman in the elite sport and exercise management workplace,” said Dr Sallie Cowan, the study’s lead and Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe Sport and Exercise Medicine Research Centre.
“Women physios and doctors working in elite sport in Australia experience significantly more gender inequality and harassment than men. They also work less paid hours per week and less paid weeks per year than men,” Dr Cowan said.
“Men are also more likely to work with men athletes – reflecting their dominance in Australian SEM roles – and roles with men’s teams are commonly considered more prestigious and are better paid.”
Under-representation of women in sports leadership is a key issue exacerbating this gender inequity within the industry, the report says. This lack of representation also enables gender harassment and discrimination, and undermines the participation and aspiration of women and girls in the sports domain.
The report highlights cultural, structural, organisational and personal barriers to women entering and sustaining sports and exercise medicine (SEM) leadership roles, including gender stereotypes, inadequate childcare, inflexible working hours, hierarchical structures, and a lack of appropriate training and mentoring.
While some of these barriers are also present for men in the industry, the report notes that the burden has disproportionately fallen on women “who spend twice as much time as men undertaking childcare and unpaid household work”.
“Women SEM physicians world-wide perceive significantly more disrespectful attitudes, have their judgement questioned and are sexually harassed more than their men counterparts,” the report says as well.
Lived experience
Highlighting their own experience of discrimination within the industry, one of the study participants, a 34-year-old woman working in elite sport and exercise medicine said: “Males are always thought to have more expertise than females regardless of their experience.”
“Males are paid more than females. Males have more opportunities than females. It is difficult to have a family as a female and retain your position, or you feel like you can’t have a family otherwise you won’t get a position.”
Another participant, a 37-year-old woman working in elite sport, said that when it comes to applying for performance positions, she has lost many roles to men who are less qualified than her, including on women’s high-performance teams.
“I’ve heard female athletes refer to their medical team as ‘the boys’ club’. The female athletes have asked for female health professionals (or at least one) and have an entire medical team of males,” she said.
Another 30-year-old woman working in elite sport said that within the industry, she’s felt a bias towards “women work with women’s teams and men work with men’s teams”, when it comes to the roles that are deemed acceptable for each gender.
And yet, she says as an example, thatt “in general, in the AFL system, the sports med team is paid approximately 50 per cent less than the men’s program staff”.
One of the male participants, a 52-year-old man, recognised the bias, saying: “I am a white heterosexual male and accept a decent percentage of my career success is due to privilege that others may not have had.”
A 44-year-old woman in SEM industry said she felt “you have to work twice as hard as a female to show that you are competent”.
What needs to change?
In order to break the cycle of longstanding gender inequity and harassment in the SEM workplace, the report is calling for affirmative action to eliminate gender bias.
The report authors say elite sporting organisations must recognise and address gender harassment in the workplace, set targets for gender equality, say ‘no’ to gender pay inequity as well as establish formal and transparent recruitment processes for equitable access to SEM careers in elite sport.
“Most SEM roles are not advertised, nor do they have formal and transparent recruitment processes,” says the report.
“Elite sporting organisations in Australia need to do better to ensure equal access, opportunities for all for roles, drive organisational change and reduce gender bias in elite sport.”