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AUSTRALIA

AFL women's league may threaten not boost diversity

  • 05 September 2016

 

It's been a long time coming: starting next year, women will have the opportunity to play professional Australian Rules Football at a national level. The competition was announced earlier this year, with the AFL to run a competition that will start in February and last for the eight weeks.

There are both inherent risks and opportunities in developing the new league. The risks are that things will be done as they always have been: that the values and approaches of sporting institutions over 100 years old will infect the league from the beginning.

The AFL is disproportionately white, male, straight and wealthy. While the players will be female, there is a danger that the new league's administration will replicate the AFL's existing power structures.

But there is also opportunity. With the new league can come a new focus on intersectionality: in ensuring that players from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds are given every opportunity to thrive, and where, rather than replicating historic power structures, the leadership of the competition can be built around values including diversity.

Unfortunately, the early signs have not been good. From player payments to the lack of diversity in exhibition teams to recruitment of off-field staff, it seems the women's league is heading down the same path as its male counterpart: mostly white, with men in positions of power and few opportunities for women from poor backgrounds.

Early recruiting has certainly suggested existing power structures are likely to be replicated in the League. Of the seven coaches named so far to the women’s league, only two — Fremantle’s Michelle Cowan and Adelaide’s Bec Goddard — are female.

This dominance of male coaches again replicated model in which women are accountable largely to men: both as coaches and in senior management roles. The exceptions are Adelaide, Fremantle, Brisbane and Collingwood, whose org charts have women in senior roles in their women’s football department.

If a leadership role in the women's league is seen as a stepping stone into coaching or administration in the men's competition and remains a pathway primarily for men, it will be a problem. The league needs to provide pathways for women to develop those skills in at least equal numbers to men. A women's league that is dominated by men off the field substantially undermines the project of developing opportunities for women in football.

 

"Football has been a site where Indigenous men have had opportunities rarely available to them in other parts
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