CEO of Canadian Women & Sport details issues with sporting system and how it can improve

Girls talk to us about many different barriers, they talk about bullying, they talk about unfair treatment, they talk about exclusion and that can take different dimensions. Cost is one of the highest reported barriers that girls reported and you might say well cost is a factor for everyone. That is absolutely true. But as with most, if not all things, if you put a gender lens on it, you see that there's a different dynamic happening for girls, especially once that dropout starts happening, that sort of snowball effect. Girls have fewer girls to play with and against, and they have to travel further and further in order to do that. And so there's almost a tax just by virtue of being a girl in the sports system in that sense. And so then when we talk about solutions, we can think about things like infrastructure and are we making the infrastructure, the rinks, the pools, the fields, equitably available? Are we acknowledging that girls right now are having to travel, in many cases, further than their male counterparts? And how might we counteract that by creating new teams, by creating new opportunities for them to play more locally? The great thing about data is that it gives us insights that we might not have otherwise and opportunities to act on that.