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Public Health in Sporting Settings: A Gender Perspective

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Sports-Based Health Interventions

Abstract

The author points out that the majority of sport-based public health interventions tend to be aimed specifically at men, perhaps largely in response to the fact that men are less likely than women to access health service provision. Women may be seen as less in need of interventions delivered through the medium of sport. Nonetheless, there are clear gains to be achieved by increasing women’s participation in sport, as well as delivering health promotion messages and services to women through sport-related channels. Targeting women in this way, however, requires a clear understanding of how both women and men experience sport, both as active participants and as spectators.

Adopting a gender perspective, the chapter sets out the factors which shape how women, and then men, experience sport in both capacities—the elements which encourage and support engagement, and those which deter and impede it. It is shown that, whilst women’s engagement in sport has generally increased in recent years, progress remains uncertain, with local periodic reverses being common, and women in many societies still being excluded from sport by religious and cultural constraints.

Creating a more family-friendly environment in many (male) sports arenas (such as football stadia) is shown as having helped to encourage greater female participation, but the more limited extent, and media coverage of, women’s sport is itself viewed as a barrier to women’s increased engagement (for example, maintaining a shortage of positive female role models). Ways of improving women’s perceptions of sport are considered, including addressing girls’ experience of sport and exercise in schools.

It is concluded that, with a gender-sensitive approach, there is now much more scope for reaching out to women through the medium of sport, and particularly of adopting broader public health objectives (beyond empowerment and fitness aims) in the way now being seen with men.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.un.org/wcm/content/site/sport/home/sport

  2. 2.

    http://www.feminist.org/research/sports/sports12.html

  3. 3.

    http://www.olympic.org/women-sport-commission

  4. 4.

    http://www.wsff.org.uk/system/1/assets/files/000/000/265/265/4bfd5faba/original/Trends_Women’s_Participation.pdf

  5. 5.

    http://www.wsff.org.uk/system/1/assets/files/000/000/265/265/4bfd5faba/original/Trends_Women’s_Participation.pdf

  6. 6.

    http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/en/sitecore/content/home/support-us/do-you-know-the-factors-influencing-girls-participation-in-sports.aspx

  7. 7.

    http://www.wsff.org.uk/the-challenge/the-challenge-elite-sportswomen

  8. 8.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/others/special-report-womens-sport-has-far-to-go-but-the-wheels-turn-slowly-8735036.html

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  1. Centre for Men’s Health, Leeds Beckett University, City Campus, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS1 3HE, UK

    Alan White

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    David Conrad

  2. Institute for Health & Wellbeing, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Alan White

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White, A. (2016). Public Health in Sporting Settings: A Gender Perspective. In: Conrad, D., White, A. (eds) Sports-Based Health Interventions. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5996-5_4

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