Promote visibility to close sport’s gender gap

First published in The New Statesman by Dana Strong, Group Chief Executive Officer, Sky

Sport has the power to improve people’s lives. Watching it brings us together. Playing it makes us healthier. Being part of a team teaches young people vital life skills like collaboration, resilience and leadership. It’s no surprise that those who keep participating in sport as they grow into adulthood are more likely to succeed.

At Sky, we’ve always believed that sport brings people incalculable benefits, and our ambition is to bring more sport to more fans, in the best ways possible. 

For me personally, sport is close to my heart. I played many different sports from a young age, but my real joy was football which I discovered as a teenager and played in school and college. And I am certain my experience in sport as a youth has played a major role in my life as an adult.

I’m proud that Sky is the UK’s biggest investor in women’s sports rights. Over and above that investment, we’re focused on working with our partners to further grow fanbases, reaching more young people, and engaging more female sports fans than ever with the action, the athletes and, of course, our world-class coverage.

Yet, in the UK, there’s a gender gap when it comes to participation in sport. Around the age of 11, nearly one girl in every three stops believing that sport is for her. And when girls stop believing, they stop playing. And when they stop playing, they lose the benefits to their health, wellbeing and prosperity that sport can give them. That’s why we commissioned Public First to investigate the barriers to female participation in sport.

Its findings show that even in the year our Lionesses were crowned European Champions for a second time, hundreds of thousands of girls are still being held back. One in three girls experienced sexist comments while playing sport. One in five say that their school only has a boys’ football team. Nearly half don’t feel comfortable getting changed for PE. All of these factors contribute to girls disengaging from sport.

At Sky, we want to bring policymakers and the sports industry together to address these barriers with positive solutions that will make tangible and lasting differences. Closing the participation gap will improve girls’ physical and mental wellbeing, increase their resilience and help them to become the leaders of the future.

The report estimates that this will deliver productivity gains of around £650 million to the UK economy.

Importantly, girls need visible role models in sport. Over half of the girls we surveyed agreed that watching professional female athletes inspires them to do more sport. That’s why, amongst the policy recommendations based on the insights from this research, we’re calling for tax relief on the production cost of covering women’s sport.

This relief would enable broadcasters to invest more in the live coverage of women’s sports – increasing the amount of women’s sports that is available to view, driving greater innovation in sports production and creating jobs and boosting opportunities for independent producers. Not only will it help keep the UK at the forefront of world-class sports production, but more content, with innovative new ways of reaching fans, would give people even more ways to engage.

As the UK’s leading broadcaster of women’s sport, we have a crucial role to play. We would commit that any revenue or savings generated from the AV expenditure relief would be reinvested back into women’s sport. We’d look to increase the breadth and depth of our live coverage and commit to going further to support the whole ecosystem – looking for opportunities to invest in grassroots sport to enable the next generation of girls and boys to play and to achieve their potential.

We are excited to announce a brilliant new opportunity for girls to play football, through our partnership with Alessia Russo and Goals 4 Girls to stage and scale a new girls’ football tournament in the UK. This will enable underserved girls to play competitively, and potentially, to grow and become the Lionesses of the future. This is what I hope will be the first of many innovative partnerships where Sky will partner with others to keep girls watching, playing and winning through sport.