Tigers commit to lead on gender issues Samantha Lane
The Age
August 31, 2014 Richmond will radically transform the way it recruits, promotes and looks in order to be the AFL leader on gender equity – eventually with an equal male/female staff mix – and become the competition's most woman-friendly club.
Using a groundbreaking, and in parts confronting, report from a three-year Australian Sports Commission and AFL-backed project as a guide, the Tigers believe they will reap considerable financial rewards through the affirmative action.
The strategy has been under way since Richmond initiated a pioneering project that has starkly documented how women working in football have felt repressed in the industry due to their sex.
Fairfax Media has on Saturday detailed the 56-page gender report that will inform the Tigers' next moves.
Richmond has already held internal briefings on the report co-authored by Dr Pippa Grange and Paul Oliver. From January next year the Tigers will pledge to enact profound change on the club's management structure and culture, including the deliberate boosting of female staff numbers. Richmond will also set clearly defined targets to give itself a more diverse board and executive in what will be a wholesale review of leadership structures at the club driven by chief executive Brendon Gale and overseen by president Peggy O'Neal.
All structural, cultural, leadership and business practices will be re-evaluated with a sharpened gender equity mindset and the Tigers are convinced the more contemporary business set-up will eventually pay dividends financially.
The club has already set itself a 10-year target of having a staff corps with a 50/50 gender split.
While the Grange-Oliver report says overt sexism and discrimination are now largely confined to a bygone era in football, candid interviews for the project highlight how a pervading "blokey culture" still stifles and troubles women working in the game.
Men working in the industry who were interviewed for the paper generally expressed caution about what they saw as the thorny matter of women's issues. They said they were open to supporting women in the game but had a limited vision about how that was best achieved.
A strong theme of the paper is that women have suffered from a commonly held belief within the AFL that they should "fit in" to the culture, rather than have cultures adapted to be more inclusive.
With a membership base that is only 31 per cent female, Richmond is below the competition average of 34 per cent, an issue that has vexed the club for some time. Compared with AFL standards, however, women are well represented in the Tigers' hierarchy. Not only does the club have the first female president in VFL/AFL history, it has two females on its nine-member board and two on its seven-member executive. As of April, women made up 37 per cent of Richmond's total staff.
The scarcity of women in positions of influence across the competition remains a sensitive point for the AFL, which this year made the candid admission it could have done better on the topic despite the 44 per cent female fan base the league has always trumpeted.
Andrew Demetriou used his last speech as AFL CEO to acknowledge the failing and his successor, Gillon McLachlan, has taken the complex matter up in earnest, empowering the league's sole female executive, Dorothy Hisgrove, to steer the approach.
Of the 148 board positions at the AFL's 18 clubs, only 22 are filled by females – up from 17 in 2011, when Colin Carter, a former AFL commissioner, AFL life member and current Geelong president, said the game was "way off base" in terms of women in positions of influence.
The West Coast Eagles are the only club without a female presence on its board this year.
The AFL, which has two female commissioners on the nine-person panel, employs 186 female staff. Its total staff numbers approximately 600.
The Grange-Oliver report cites the "weight of numbers" for women in football, and sport more broadly, as the most critical area that will catalyse meaningful change. Dr Grange, who has extensive experience working in football at clubs and the AFL Players Association, said boosting female numbers was the priority.
"There was so much positive regard and camaraderie between men and women in footy that came out in the report, but that's not the issue," she said.
"The issue is that footy is not set up to accommodate male and female talent in the way that it needs to. And we have not got a platform for women to succeed from here because we haven't got enough numbers."
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/tigers-commit-to-lead-on-gender-issues-20140830-10aevt.html
