From the Olympics to the next steps

TOKYO 2020 OLYMPICS: “THE MOST GENDER-BALANCED” GAMES IN HISTORY

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics is to be known as “the most gender-balanced” edition in History. That is indeed something to celebrate! According to the IOC, their achievements and commitments on this matter include:

• Almost 49% of female athletic participation, making the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 “the first gender-equal Olympic Games”;
• All 206 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) with at least one female and one male athlete in their Olympic teams — for the first time;
• The Chef de Mission of the IOC Refugee Olympic Team Tokyo 2020 was the three-time Olympian recordist and world record-holder for many years Ms. Tegla Loroupe — an advocate for peace, the refugee cause, education, and women’s rights. She was also the organizer of the Refugee Team for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio;

• Ms. Anita DeFrantz was the first IOC’s Vice-President at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. She’s a bronze medallist at the Olympic Games Montreal 1976, a pioneer in athletics involved in women’s empowerment, that became the first African-American and first American woman on the International Olympic Committee in 1986;
• The athletes were represented by the IOC Athletes’ Commission (AC) with the majority of whose members directly elected by the athletes themselves;
• The IOC AC consists of 11 female and 6 male members. The Chair of the AC and member of the IOC Executive Board is Ms. Kirsty Coventry, a five-time Olympian, and winner of seven Olympic medals. The Vice-Chair is Ms. Danka Bartekova, a three-time Olympian and bronze medallist at the Olympic Games London 2012, who has also already qualified for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020;
• The IOC President has been appointed by UN Women as a HeforShe Champion in recognition of the IOC’s contribution and commitment to gender equality;

According to the organization, female employees represent nowadays 53% of the IOC administration. Female participation has been boosted by the 2020 Olympic Agenda:

• Female IOC membership stands at 37.5%, been raised from 21% in comparison to before that;
• Female representation on the IOC Executive Board stands at 33.3%, with an increase from the originally 26.6%;
• Women account for 47.8% of the members of the IOC’s commissions, compared with the 20.3% at the 2020 pre-Olympic Agenda.

It’s very positive that the IOC increases their female participation while ensuring that these women occupying the new professional opportunities are qualified and connected with the sports ecosystem. This might mean that sports and women’s football can be desirable and interesting paths for international and global job opportunities.

While female participation increases, there is a lot to unpack to change the sports culture into a more diverse and inclusive environment. Many may have heard about the uniforms problem being recalled at this edition of the events, such as Norway’s women’s beach handball team being fined after they refused to play in bikini bottoms.

We still have to deal with the banning of swimming caps that accommodate voluminous Black hair, in the IOC president’s reference to the people of Japan as “Chinese”, and in women being denied a chance to run because they didn’t chemically alter their natural hormones and they have all refused to lower their testosterone with birth control pills. There is progress, without any doubt, and (some) athletes can finally express themselves.

SIMILAR SEXIST PROBLEMS, DIFFERENT RESPONSES

Although is great to look at inspiring models at the international level, when we look at football on the local level, it feels like gender inequality is changing at a really slow pace. We probably won’t find this kind of information that has been displayed by the IOC on women’s participation as easily on other institutions, such as the continental and the national federation websites, for instance.

With episodes at least as sexists as when Tokyo 2020 Olympics chief Yoshiro Mori stepped down after the sexist remarks that he made about women, we might assume that the Brazilian Federation (CBF) would wanna make sure that their public image is attached to more positive values, such as gender equality, diversity, transparency. We would expect something more like that, especially after several repeated ethical scandals with their presidents, including the latest accusations on president Rogerio Caboclo for sexually harassing more than one female employee.

Mori said at an Olympics board of trustees meeting last week that “board meetings with lots of women take longer” because “women are competitive — if one member raises their hand to speak, others might think they need to talk too,” according to reports in the Japanese press. “If you want to increase female membership, you would be in trouble unless you put time limits in place,” he is reported to have added.

So, not being a harasser (for men) and not getting sexually harassed at our workplaces (for women) luckily might become a new normal in Brazil. At the same time, increasing women’s participation — in and off the field — might be a new parameter for the international sports community. The women’s future is slowly changing, fighting a lot of barriers, for sure, but the present shows improvement. And that’s important.

The Brazilian Federation started increasing women’s visibility on their website, but CONMEBOL still shows a very male environment, in my opinion. Take CONCACAF’s website as a parameter, for instance. I mean, probably men still occupy more than 50% of the page (and of the executive roles), but at the very least you can see that women exist, right?

I can’t wait for more metrics on diversity, that consider race, and class, for instance, to be put into practice! I can’t wait for people occupying spaces of power to show themselves ethical and truly committed to the purposes of their position. And, honestly, I hope that we might see that problems and scandals actually can lead us to better scenarios — instead of bringing up old unsolved problems that make us feel stuck in the past.

DRIVING FOR CHANGES IN WOMEN’S FOOTBALL AND MAKING IT ACCOUNTABLE

A few months ago I was reading this scientific paper called “An institutional approach to Gender Diversity and Firm Performance” and one important argument made was that the social context matters a lot. It points out and differentiates the role of normative and regulatory legitimacy. Normative legitimacy is the acceptance of practice as appropriate, and desirable, based on organizational and shared norms and values. I mean, take the time to think about what we consider “normal” and might or not have a conflicting regulatory status.

Speaking on regulatory legitimacy, in February this year, FIFPRO, the biggest international football players association with their 64 national member players associations (Brazil not being one of them) made their statutory commitments public:

“As part of the new ratified statutes there will be mandatory increases in geographic and gender representation on FIFPRO’s global board. This will take effect following the next elections in November. The board will increase in size as well as in diversity, making space for new voices and instituting a mandatory minimum threshold of 33 percent for the least-represented gender. As the global player representative body, FIFPRO recognises its role to lead the industry in demonstrating that diversity is not an end goal in itself, but an essential element in high-performing and effective governance.”

According to their release, “a multi-year commitment to contribute towards research into race and inclusion in the football industry has been established, as well as cultural competency education”. That sounds very optimistic to me!

Just out of curiosity, in FIFPRO’s Report called “Shaping our future” launched in 2021 March about the men’s professional football, Brazil was among the 79 countries in the sample. It stood side by side with Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, China, and Russia in what they called “Cluster C”, gathering large football markets with advanced football economies, but often weak governance and employment conditions.

Well, I guess those are the structural problems that female soccer players share with the male players — considering they’re mostly under the rules and under the management of the same organizations in Brazil.

KEEP SUPPORTING WOMEN’S FOOTBALL BEYOND THE GREAT EVENTS

The women’s football national teams and officials showed their support against discrimination and racism through peaceful protest at the Olympic Games — Sweden, The US, Chile, England, and New Zealand. Matildas even hold up the Aboriginal flag ahead of the Olympic win over New Zealand.

As we’ve learned and repeat: gender inequality is a global and historical problem that affects many women in football. And the Women’s Football Tournament at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo showed us this again. For instance, Cristine Sinclair, from the Canadian Women’s National Team, hopes that the gold medal can change a few gender disparities in her soccer system, such as the fact that there is no women’s professional league in Canada. The Matildas made history reaching fourth place in the competition and the 21-year-old Ellie Carpenter asked that Australia continue to support.

When it comes to Brazil, Aline Pellegrino — the woman in charge of the female competitions on the Brazillian Soccer Federation — disagrees on the impact of any medal in structural changes. But as the Australians, she calls for continuous support from all stakeholders. She believes that there is a necessary process to meet continuous evolution, and there is the need to pay attention to the formation of new talents, massification, and professionalization.

WOMEN’S FOOTBALL FACE DIFFERENT NEEDS FOR LOCAL CHANGES

If we would compare over those parameters, women’s football in Canada seems to be mainly worried about the fact that there are no professional women’s soccer leagues in their country. So, most of the players are compelled to play in the American National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), which has no Canadian teams, while there is the newly-formed Canadian Premier League with eight teams for the men. While women’s football in Brazil seems to be worried about getting the sport massified, creating new talents, and improving their professionalization status.

According to the 2019 FIFA Women’s Football MA’s survey report, there were 246,142 registered youth female players (<18) in Canada. If we take half of the population of the country in that year, divide by two (to estimate the female population), and then divide these number of youth players by the estimated female population, we can say that soccer is pretty much a mass culture for the Canadian girls, because these amount of young players represent around 1.4% of the female population.

Whereas if we look at the US, even though there’s a big and impressive number of 1,520,000 registered youth female players (<18), we get a slightly smaller percentage when we consider their huge population and establish an estimated female population, around 0.9%. But the idea of massification could include other data in the report as well, such as the number of female players playing organized football. For the USA, there were 9,500,000 female players, representing 5.9% of an estimated female population, and for Canada, there were 290,087 female players, representing 1.6% of an estimated female population in that year.

Paying closer attention to the Canadian reported problem, when we consider the registered female adult players, there were 43,945 players, representing 0.25% of an estimated female population. In comparison to the US, there were 80,000 players, representing 0.0.5% of an estimated female population. That could mean that Canada has a real problem of repressed demand for their professionalization as Canadian soccer players, with national competition and leagues, as Sinclair argued before.

Just to make more explicit the gender-based Brazilian problem on the massification of women’s football, we didn’t even have 500 youth players registered on that same report published in 2019; that amount would represent 0.0005% of an estimated female population. For Brazil, in that same report, there were 2,974 registered female adult players, representing 0.003%, and 15,000 female players, representing 0.01% of an estimated female population in that year.

That seems very hard to explain without the gender discrimination argument, considering that football is massified for men in Brazil. As Pellegrino said, there are profound scars over the 38 ban that women faced in Brazil, and to overcome that cultural heritage based on gender discrimination demands a lot of work. I’m mean, we’re not even talking about visibility or an intern market for women’s football here. Increasing these local numbers to get closer to the international market is an enormous challenge for women’s football in Brazil — a bigger and more important challenge than the Olympic gold medal, in my opinion.

I wonder how the other countries that faced a women’s football ban (like France, England, and Germany) are doing and what can we learn from their experiences.

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Credits: Natalia Lopes