But Football is a Boy’s Sport…
As if it were yesterday, the memory of my first PE lesson hurtles to the front of my mind. I’d forgotten my trainers. I did, however, have a pair of football boots. They were ones the school had told me I needed in their uniform requirements checklist. A very nervous eleven-year-old me proceeded to explain my missing trainers, but present football boots, to the head of PE, apologising profusely.
I was met with wry smile and the statement:
‘girls don’t play football’.
His words stung and etched themselves into my secondary school career. I never did use those football boots, not once.
I passed them on to a younger brother who used them until they broke. I experienced many sports during school PE lessons: rounders, trampolining, dance, table tennis, dodgeball… but never football or rugby.
PE was ‘girl-boy’ separated until GCSE years, and even then, when we finally got to pick which sport to do, very few girls chose the sports we had been conditioned to think weren’t for us.
I didn’t think about it too much at the time because I assumed that was just how things were. I’ve since learned it was similar at my friends’ schools too. With hindsight and more awareness of the inequalities in sport, I want to know why I wasn’t given the same sporting opportunities as the boys.
From what I have found, the government line on the issue, as of 2018, is essentially ‘but boys can be more physical than girls so separate them if necessary’. Firstly, the assumption that all boys enjoy sport is erroneous, not all are more physical simply because of biology. Secondly, and more importantly, in primary school we were all able to partake in PE together.
So, what changed in that transition to secondary school?
And, why does that mean we didn’t do football and rugby?
I accept that boys can be more aggressive and competitive, though largely blame this on the social conditioning of girls from a young age to act like ‘ladies’ – whatever that means nowadays – but to completely exclude a gender from a sport, without the opportunity to try it, seems inexplicable. To me, that is just reinforcing the belief that certain sports are for predetermined genders.
I am certain that if I were to ask my old PE teachers why girls didn’t do football and rugby, I would be told that it’s because we don’t like them. However, as a girl who regularly attended football matches with her dad from the age of 8, I would have liked the opportunity to counter that stereotype, even if we just did a term of girls only football. Even now, many of my female friends won’t watch football with me because they don’t enjoy it, and I wonder if that would have been different, had they been able to give it a go?
As an adult, who one day may be a parent, I want this to change. While my school experience may not mirror that of everyone else’s, and I hope that perhaps my school was an anomaly, I don’t think the separation benefited anyone.
The separation of sports in schools likely meant that many potential sports stars just weren’t discovered, and more upsetting than that, is that many children may have simply decided that they dislike sport entirely. If we are striving for equal opportunities in society, this must extend into sport in schools as well.
Hopefully, in the future, we stop the rhetoric that places sports and genders together and make it an environment for everyone.
