Many of us never questioned the idea that men’s football was the default sport, but young people are undoing decades of toxic stereotypes
As someone who was born in the 80s, I was completely clueless that women’s football was even a thing. While the boys school down the road played it during P.E, we had netball, rounders and prancing around in god-awful gym knickers doing dance and gymnastics. It’s unsurprising given the FA banned women’s football from FA-affiliated football grounds for 51 years, until 1972.
At university, any women vocal about liking the game were interrogated about stats and players to a degree that would put the Spanish inquisition to shame. That was how people treated women who liked football, let alone watched or supported women’s football. As a result, many of us never questioned the idea that men’s football was the default sport, and we believed the pervasive sexist trope that men were just naturally more interested in football than women. The damaging, untold impact that has had on girls and women, who may have taken up the sport if there had been more equal role-modelling, is expressed within the wider issue around the gender sports gap that begins when we are children.
Some people might think it’s just about sport, but it has an impact in other areas of life. Sport is a conduit to feeling empowered in your own body, and in awomen who played sport at school were more vocal, more able to take risks and were able to troubleshoot better. And conversely, when stereotypes of who should play sport is reinforced into the fabric of society, it widens the gender divide and creates bullying behaviour. When I wrote my book
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