Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Committee. Today we are holding an oral evidence session on routes into non-participatory roles in sport for girls and women. We will hear from Emma Batchelor, head of performance health at England and GB Hockey, UK Sports Institute; Gemma Davies, senior lecturer in sports performance analysis at Cardiff Met and lead performance analyst at Welsh Feathers; Professor Kirsty Elliott-Sale, professor of female endocrinology and exercise physiology at Manchester Met; Professor Leanne Norman, professor of women in sport and director of the Women in Sport Research and Innovation Hub at Loughborough University; and Dr Alice Harkness-Armstrong, lecturer in performance analysis, School of Sport, Rehabilitation and Exercise Sciences at the University of Essex. You have long job titles, which means you are the perfect expert witnesses for today. I am really excited to hear about some of the work you have been doing and the areas that we can see improvements in.

Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming. Gemma and Emma, how would you characterise the current gender balance across sports science in academia and applied practice?

From an academic perspective, I teach at Cardiff Metropolitan University specifically on the sport performance analysis programme and pathway. I have some numbers from 2024-2025 academic data: from an undergraduate perspective there were 1,952 students across a number of our different sports science courses. Of those, 616—31%—were female. To give you some key stats: in the sport performance analysis programme I teach, 9% of students are female, the lowest across the school in sports science. Sport, PE and health was the only programme that had more female students than male at 54%.

I work at UK Sports Institute and for GB Hockey. From a GB Hockey perspective there is definitely an equal split between male and female genders. Interestingly, across medicine there is probably more of an alignment with female practitioners, while across strength and conditioning and physical preparation there are more male practitioners. Across the network in terms of physiotherapy there is a bias towards more female than male practitioners and in terms of strength and conditioning there is a bias towards more male practitioners. In the other disciplines there is a fair mix in terms of both genders across the network.

Bearing all those figures in mind, to what extent do men and women have equal opportunities when pursuing a career or educational pathway in sports science? Where do you see the barriers, if any?

Talking about gender balance from a staffing perspective, there are more females than males within sports performance analysis, which I guess shows progression within our area and an opportunity for females to become academics within sports performance analysis. I am specifically talking about that discipline. In terms of barriers, academia has grown rapidly and is very supportive of females within our area and our discipline. As a bit of a caveat, this is my first week back from maternity leave. I have been very well supported during that period, which was a barrier to previous females developing through our discipline.

Does anyone else want to add anything to that?

We have touched on it already but for me the issue is maybe not so much the entry: it is progression and visibility. The stats show that mirroring of the balance within our professions in sport. You find more women on courses such as nutrition and the medical courses, but as Gemma has alluded to with coaching—more with strength and conditioning—you find more male candidates. On visibility, the way that we advertise sport, who is doing the advertising, and the language in our recruitment is very male-centric. We only have to look at the teams teaching these courses. As women are not represented in academic leadership in sports sciences—it is under 30%—you then have this vicious cycle. I think it betrays the amount of routes into these courses, the professions, and the amount of careers that contribute to sporting success. The way we value and what we value in sport is still very centred on particular roles. We still have a lot of work to do to showcase the amount of careers that contribute to that success.

Kirsty, bearing in mind what has been said about advertising and language, what steps could universities or the Government take to increase the proportion of women taking sports science degrees?

That is a great question. It is about visibility, as Leanne said. It has become a bit of a catchphrase: “If you can see it, you can be it.” It is really important that women in all positions from the ground up to senior leadership are visible to younger girls and women, that they know this is a career for them where there is an opportunity for growth and development, and that they no longer see it as sport being just for men. It is that visibility that we need to increase.

You have heard that employment in sports and exercise sectors is currently, so to speak, an under-utilised vehicle for tackling youth unemployment and improving social mobility. Do any of you have views on that specifically?

Clearly I love sport and science and it is a perfect marriage for me. It is communicating that, when it comes to a profession such as sports science, and the other disciplines that bolt on to it—sports and exercise science, sports science and medicine, or sports science and nutrition—it is about showcasing what that is. People potentially see sport as a niche area of society but actually the ripples that a career in sports science can bring you are immense. It could be that you are a practitioner working directly with Olympic and Paralympic professional athletes but we go right through to sports management, events, and the legacy of the Olympics. There are so many different pathways. I feel that careers in sports are under-utilised. Again, if we showcase and increase that visibility it will become, as you said, a bigger vehicle for change.

How much is it to do with a lack of transparency and structure in the pathways so that young women and girls can see a career path from something they love doing into a job or a university degree and then into a career?

I do not think it is always that obvious. I will be honest: I grew up at a time when sports science was not a subject. My aspiration was to be a PE teacher. It was actually a bit of a “Sliding Doors” moment. I applied to do coaching science, which is probably the lesser-known cousin of sports science, but I thought it was PE; that is what I thought I was applying for. It was only when I was there, almost by accident, that I realised the potential of this discipline. We need to clearly communicate the potential of this as a career and the growth that it has and, as we have all mentioned, it really has become something special. Particularly if you are privileged enough to work in women’s sports—not just a woman in sports science—the potential for growth is incredible.

The work that we are doing is very much around changing the language, as Kirsty alluded to, to talking about careers and pathways rather than this singular linear that we start here and end there. My work is in coaching and we still have this idea that everybody wants to progress through to be, in this case, England manager or head coach.

It is not a bad job.

I am not sure I would want that job. It would support gender equity if we opened up these ideas of the routes through, particularly if women come back from maternity leave or career breaks, which benefit everybody. I was speaking to a head coach on “Sport on Friday” about the power connotations of having a male head coach and the impact on women in those environments where all the decision making goes through the head coach. It would rebalance the power relationship if we could use different language in different careers. In some areas they use technical lead instead of head coach, which has led to an increase in women applying for those roles. The language is really important.

Things as simple as changing the title have an effect.

Absolutely, yes.

It is an important part to consider. It is not just the role of schools and universities to advertise courses and change the language but as an academic I believe 100% that we have a very important part in that. In addition, it is the role of the clubs, the sports, and the governing bodies to be within that process. For example, I fell into performance analysis. Equally, I went to university to study sports science; I did not quite know what I was going to do at the time and fell into that industry; it was not something that was advertised. If you did not look in depth at sports teams, you would not even know they have performance analysts within their management set-ups. I say that from a perspective that there are media personnel working in teams. Everyone knows the main ones—physiotherapists, strength and conditioning coaches, and the head coaches—but it is the additional jobs within a particular club that no one shouts about that are really important to share more widely. If clubs opened their doors to schools and organisations just to come and have a look for the day—I know it is very secretive within those environments because they do not want to give any tricks and tips to other clubs—it would certainly help the development and advertising of these roles within clubs and sports.

It is not just the young people themselves when they are starting their careers; parents also need to be taken on a journey so that the family can support young people in their choice to go into sports science and see a pathway to a career. I know a lot of parents would be worried if they did not know the industry their child chose to pursue and might therefore encourage them to go into other industries where there is a much clearer pathway for them to see. What do you think could be done to take the whole family on a journey to ensure more young people take these routes?

That is a terrific question. I am a parent who has children of university age so I have just done the whole open day circuit with them. One opportunity is through those open days. Most prospective university students tend to come with parents or other family members. It is about showcasing the diversity of opportunity to them because we are all aware that we have a lot of sports science graduates and there are only a small number of jobs in elite sport. If I heard that as a parent, I would probably not think that was the best opportunity or decision for my child. As we have said, it is about showing them the potential that sports science offers and focusing specifically on some of those girls and younger women to make sure that the people who present at the open days and give the tours are accessible for questions and answers and we see women in these positions. We tend to think about jobs outside academia but many of us on this panel represent people who studied sports science and have continued in an academic setting to teach the next generation. It is understanding there is potential even in-house, but possibly open days for universities could be a really great way to showcase that.

Certainly from the perspective of delivering and supporting open days, probably the most queries we have are from families and parents who are unfamiliar with the discipline, or who just see sport as playing sport; they do not see the other pathways that might come with it. Probably the biggest conversation piece we have with families is to say, “Okay, it’s not just performance; it’s participation; it’s everything in between.” I suppose it is demonstrating the diversity in curriculum that we have within sports science across the different disciplines to see where those different exit routes are. That is probably the biggest conversation piece in my experience of open days and it is an important piece to do.

It is the credibility of these roles as well. It is a long time ago now but I still remind my mum about this: when I was walking home from school she told me that I was to take languages and not sport. I did it anyway. She said, “You’ll never work in sport as a woman.” I still remind her of that conversation 30 years on. For her, the fear was the credibility. Until we raise the credibility and the value of these roles—not the pay, security, and precarity that we have—there will be a lot of valid fears from parents about the career route. I spoke to a female coach quite recently who, when she describes what she does, does not call herself a coach even though she is. She describes herself as a teacher because she said that has more credibility in people’s eyes. As we have mentioned, it is raising the credibility and the value of these roles.

I had a similar conversation with my mum about politics. I was right, but for quite some time she was right.

Leanne, what you just said leads on nicely to the next question. What are the key factors affecting the retention and progression of women in sports science, coaching and performance roles?

That is a very good question and it keeps me up at night. The complexity and a myriad of factors create a really difficult and challenging situation. I work with a lot of sports organisations that work really hard and try their best but often they only have limited resource or capacity to challenge it through one route. For me, it is structural: the precarity of positions and the really poor pay. The contract status really needs to be addressed. For example, I spoke to a coach who has her rent renewed every three months. There is a contract on her house, and the contract for her coaching role is renewed every two months—or the other way round—but there is constant anxiety every two months. That is what we are asking people to go into. The structural issues are really challenging. I was working with a sport last week that has a good pipeline of women coming through, hundreds of women at a really good stage, but there are only seven jobs for them to go into. What is the message there? We are saying, “Come on, come through this career, this pathway, but there are only seven jobs for you at the end.” Again, it is about opening that up. In addition to that there is a cultural aspect. We know from the work that we led in partnership with Women in Sport, which was presented at the first hearing, that women are far more likely to have their credibility questioned on gendered grounds. Credibility, respect, all of those, are still very much gendered and they do not feel included or have a sense of belonging when they walk into those spaces. Organisationally, we know women have less opportunities for progression and development. We know from our work that they have less conversations about development and are more likely to be denied opportunities for promotion, development, and all those factors. Finally, we know from our research that women are exposed to more likelihood of harm, discrimination, harassment, and gender-based violence. Those conditions create a really challenging environment for women to work in and you have to be pretty resilient to want to go into this and stay in it.

That is really comprehensive and incredibly grim. On the workers’ rights side of things, what you have said really tallies with what we have heard in other evidence sessions about the work being insecure, low paid, and often irregular. People are often self-employed or even in voluntary roles. Are sports governing bodies doing enough to incentivise good practice in terms of inclusive employment conditions?

Gemma made a really good point. The role of clubs is crucial. The relationship between governing bodies and clubs needs to be improved. I see a lot of great practice in governing bodies and people trying hard but when we have talked about working standards—I know it is on the agenda of UK Sport—you need investment to drive that. There is just not the investment to make that happen and clubs live hand to mouth in survival mode. Through the work we led with Women in Sport we spoke to a huge sample of leaders who said, “Right now it’s not a priority because it can’t be a priority; we are literally surviving at the moment.” I agree that the protection of our coaches and those working in sports needs to be looked at and a lot of our coaches just do not have basic workers’ rights. There are very few written agreements and contracts that protect them. Of course sport is upheld by volunteers so they do not have that protection, or they are self-employed. Access to things such as maternity pay and policies is just not there. Finally, the awareness of people working in sport of what protections and policies are in place is very low. We have a job to do to raise awareness that this is what we have on offer as a governing body or as a club; this is what is open to you; this is what you can take us up on. There is an awareness piece as well as having something in place.

I am going to shift gears a little and speak about women and girls who are more on the research side, particularly as I am a physiologist. There is some positive news here. It will not quite balance the shade that we see but there is a little light. With the development of women’s sport, I see a lot more women starting to research women’s sport. That is great; they now see a place for themselves as researchers within sports science so they are looking to support women’s sport and development. A lot of people can now see career longevity and are choosing that career path, which is fantastic, but I guess it is a double-edged sword because we need to be mindful that, while it is great to see so many women researching women’s sport, we do not exclude men. We should not be gatekeeping research into women’s sport from men in the same way that men should not gatekeep research into men’s sport from women. There is certainly a balance to be had but it has been heartwarming recently to see many young, early career researchers identifying women’s sport as a real opportunity. As I say, as women’s sport has developed so has the popularity and we can see a better pipeline and hopefully a more sustainable academic career for some of those researchers.

It is really heartening because it was not really an option when I was a kid in the noughties and the 2010s. I was not particularly sporty but I think that was because we did not have the opportunities. Does anyone want to add anything?

Let me add a couple of things to what Leanne said about governing bodies and clubs relating to your first question. Positively, we are looking now at the Netball Super League, which is the professional domestic league in the UK. There are eight teams in that league and five of them have female analysts, which is fantastic. It is nice to see the progression of undergrads into courses and placements for those particular roles. On the flip side, of those eight teams only one has full-time contracts. The other seven rely on what we class as season contracts or game-by-game contracts, which links back to the lack of security for those particular individuals. Many of those individuals will have secondary jobs or—I should flip it—netball is their second job and they have main roles in other areas, whether that is HE, FE or maybe other analyst positions elsewhere. Similarly, that links into the international campaign. In the Commonwealth games due to start in a couple of weeks in Glasgow, there are a number of teams that have no analysts from international clubs. It is usually the African nations but even homegrown teams that are competing are maybe student supported, season-by-season or campaign competition-supported. Again, there is a lack of working rights for those individuals. Just to close this off and give other people a chance to speak, my role outside academia is lead analyst with Welsh Feathers. This year, obviously on the back of maternity leave, I decided not to attend the Commonwealth games as a performance analyst as it is my boy’s first birthday during the campaign. Although that is my position with the national governing body there has been no pay for the last 12 months, quite rightly so because I have not attended campaigns because I am only a contracted individual and worker within that environment, but it just sets the landscape for you to appreciate how it might look in other teams as well. There is a massive amount of work to be done and not just by the governing bodies. Of course they are hamstrung by finances. There is a greater piece that needs to be done to support analysts and sports science workers. Just to link to the Netball Super League, performance analysis is a compulsory requirement of the league. To put it in perspective, there is one full-time analyst who is paid. That sets the scene of what the requirements of the league are and where we are as workers in that environment.

It is really stark.

My background is more around Olympic sport. We have just come through another funding review. Looking at the NGB aspect of it, for hockey there are 110 days of travel a year for a practitioner. If you are a physiotherapist, you are away for approximately a third of the year. We do not retain some people, particularly if they decide to have children because of the travel requirement and how they would balance a family life alongside work. When you have a small cohort within a team of three, the impact of someone not being able to travel has a massive impact on the other practitioners working in that sport. I still feel we are not at the point of being able to support it really easily because if your role is lead physiotherapist there is a high expectation you will be away a lot.

Alice, in your experience how accessible are practitioner roles for women in men’s sports? To what extent do you think working in women’s sport is seen as a stepping stone to men’s sport? What can be done so that women’s sport can recruit and retain highly-skilled practitioners?

In terms of experiences and accessibility I am obviously an academic; that is my main job. I am a lecturer but I also do applied work. I work with the England deaf women’s futsal team and over the past couple of years I have worked with cerebral palsy partially-sighted teams. Prior to that, I worked in male and female football environments, volleyball and across different sports. I like the diversity in sport. We learn a lot from one another rather than focusing on one but there are lots of challenges. It is not just sports; it is clubs that have women’s arms attached to men’s arms and the wider environment and culture of that. Gemma mentioned analysts and those kinds of opportunities. Within our discipline in particular, there is a real precedent for unpaid and voluntary internships in early career. Those coming out with graduate degrees should be ready to be employed but actually the industry is not there to recognise and remunerate those people. There is probably a lot of drop-out at that stage because we simply do not have people who can support themselves financially through these unpaid internships. That is a particular issue with men’s football. I am sure others can attest to that in other sports. I have had positive and negative experiences in men’s environments; it has not been a one-size-fits-all. As I said, the environment and the culture are important but so are the people in your team who lead and develop that. I have experienced systemic and individual issues. You need to be robust and resilient to be a practitioner in men’s sport. I could go on for a while but I will try not to. Probably the main thing for me was when I was coming out of university. The first placement opportunity I looked at was in men’s football; I was shortlisted. I had an interview and my feedback was, “You’re a woman.” Outright, that was the conversation. Essentially, “You’re a woman; you couldn’t deal with this environment.” I will not name the club but it was very disheartening for that to be my very first experience of trying to get an applied opportunity. Thankfully, I went on to better opportunities and better experiences.

With better clubs.

There are very blatant issues and some very subtle hidden issues that are much harder to navigate and challenge. To be honest, we could probably speak for two hours on that question alone.

I am speechless; that is utterly disgraceful. Does anyone have anything else to add?

I was talking to a female coach recently about whether she would be open or interested in going into the men’s game because she talked very much about working in the women’s game. Even the idea that we have a men’s game and a women’s game is quite baffling for me. Our vision should be to bring sport together. That in itself is interesting. Somebody once said it is like a football pitch: women have half the pitch of opportunities and men have the whole pitch. I was speaking to this female coach and I said, “Did you think about going for that job in the men’s game?” She said, “I did, but something innately just stopped me and it was almost a fearful perception.” She said it was just a perception though, not reality. When you speak to the clubs, some clubs want women but they often say that no women apply. We hear that a lot: “There’s no women. I don’t know any women.” There is also our coach development and coach education. In this case, we have done some work and the courses that are designed for women coaches and those who work in different women’s sports have less experiential components; they have more desk space. Yet, when you speak to clubs, what do they want? They want hours on the grass. Often men have come up through the academy systems with those hours on the grass. They have it on their CV and so the world opens up for them in terms of opportunities. We have some real holes in the development of women’s sports in that way, perhaps because the pathway is still developing. I agree with Kirsty that it is getting much better but we still have some holes there. That then impacts those who work in that environment because, again, it is the opportunities. Football is a really good example. On the men’s side you have support through the Premier League and the EPPP, which provides coach development opportunities and just those basic corridor conversations that you are not privy to if you do not work in that environment. Again, it goes back to development; it is that complexity of factors.

I would like to talk a little about the data that is available. Is there a gender data gap? Kirsty and Leanne, last year there was a study that suggested that of all the sports science research out there, about 8% is exclusively focused on women, whereas about 31% is focused on men, so there is quite a big gap. Why does that gap exist?

You are absolutely right. We have also done studies. We did one recently in football. Do not quote me on the exact figures but it was around 83% of football performance and injury data was from male-only studies, obviously leaving around 17% of females. If you looked at the participants within all those studies, women only accounted for 6% so you can see that the numbers do not lie; there clearly is a gap. The gap is one thing and with funding we can address that. Maybe the larger concern is around the quality of that research. There are a couple of issues here, and it may go back to the career pathway and university experience that we were talking about. At the moment, within sports science courses it is never overtly said but we teach, for example, male physiology. We do not say it is male physiology but it is implied; it is underneath there. Until we start embedding female physiology within the curriculum, then we are not actually going to have a generation of researchers who are well trained in order to conduct this high-quality research. We need to change it. All the way from school through university, we need to be training our sports scientists to know about female physiology, endocrinology, biomechanics, all the ologies that you might expect. If we then have this workforce able to do high-quality research, it is that high-quality research that will accelerate our knowledge and understanding of women’s sport. I see it as being a double-edged sword. We have solutions to that. Although we do not have a lot of data, there are certainly a lot of people who have been working in this area for a long time. I have been at this for a quarter of a century now. We have started to publish methodological papers in order to try to steer a new generation of high-quality studies, projects and that sort of thing. We have also tried to be much more collaborative in our approach. We have started an international consortium in the UK but we have colleagues doing the same work with us in a collective from Australia, Brazil, Denmark and the USA. This is another way to push forward. The data gap exists. We have big issues with quality but we now have a way forward with that, and hopefully we are starting to push back that tide. It will be really heartwarming to see this. I can definitely see more volume coming through in terms of publications but I would love to see that increase in quality. That will need funding and it will need to include all the other things we mentioned before: Government, national governing bodies, sports, and even the athletes themselves. It will be a collective because we often hear, rightly so, female athletes calling the media for more research to support them but equally we need them to take part. It can be hard for them to take part for all the reasons we just heard. If they have a dual career or are parents trying to balance sport with parenthood, it means their time is very limited. It is going to take a big collective push but I see a way forward. As I say, I am 25 years in. For a long time I described it as the lights were off, and now they have come on. We can choose to keep looking at that historical challenge and perspective, or we can start to shift the narrative and actually set the agenda for the opportunities that we have moving forward.

I would echo Kirsty’s point about the quality. When you look within that 6% to 8%, it is even more stark. As Kirsty alluded to, the gap is women as research participants and as research authors. Female leadership in scientific publications is below 30%, which of course mirrors the lack of women in academic leadership positions. Again, as Kirsty alluded to, we have these outdated assumptions that physiological data can be generalised and that female physiology is viewed as complex so it is often sidestepped in that way. I agree that the methodology and how we do research is just as important as what we do. To add to the sports science, we also have a team at Loughborough Sports Technology Institute with Aimee Mears and colleagues who have developed an inclusive sports engineering research framework. That is about how we do research to be more inclusive and it has been published in the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. It looks at things such as how inclusive we are in our sampling, data collection, measurement, and instrument choices. For example, in the institute we invited women to bring their children in during research and things like that. It is about how we do research to build that trust. I speak to colleagues who work in hydration or altitude, for example. They do not often get many women stepping forward to be part of research and we have a job to do to build trust with women, that we will base it around them, and that it is an inclusive way of working. How we do the work is just as important as what we do.

If sportswomen out in the field are saying they want more of this research, what is the impact of this data gap in practice in terms of performance, women’s health, and their general participation in sport?

I might be able to answer that from a practitioner’s perspective. We had a lot of money before Paris and we decided to do some blood profiling in our athlete group over a six-month period; we took six batches of blood from a group of athletes. Historically, we have always done it yearly and across both male and female athletes. Over that period e we noticed that, had we just done it yearly, we would have ended up with four or five people with iron profile disturbance with ferritin levels—the iron store—being low. Actually, by the time we got to the end of the six months, we were monitoring 18. We know that when we do conventional pre-season blood profiling—when you take them into the points of high duress in terms of physical overload—that you will see changes in those iron studies. We were lucky to get the money for this project, but it was a £50,000 project as a one-off. The difficulty we have as practitioners is then going back to the sport to say we need to do these more often, particularly with our female athletes. Ideally, we would have done the male and the female athletes because we have a similar cohort of athletes to actually look at the difference between the two because we see some changes in iron profile in the men but much less in the women. In terms of how we manage across athlete groups, sports such as hockey are in a unique position to do research across both genders. We then start to see what the difference is between female and male athletes. That might help us manage female athletes a lot more because we try to do a good job but it is very much limited. At the moment as soon as there is any idea that there might be an impact in terms of iron and low energy availability, we send them for medical bloods, so we are skirting the system rather than capturing people. This is the difference between being able to manage people from a reactive illness perspective rather than a performance perspective in terms of health performance rather than just reacting to injury and illness. That is the impact on the ground.

All athletes want evidence-informed practice, don’t they? Without the evidence it can be really difficult. There is a bit of nuance here. Particularly, again, as a physiologist, we do not want to copy and paste from men but we should also recognise that actually some data derived from men is still useful; we do not need to tear up everything and start over. Leanne put it nicely that there are sport concepts relevant to men and women. It is having that ability to look at the evidence to see what can be used and then to identify where a female lens is needed and what is missing from that. We have to be careful. We are in a time when social media is booming; it is at its peak and we have to be careful about what athletes see on social media from influencers. Do not get me wrong, I do not want to generalise too much, but it is hard for them to do their due diligence to pick out from social media when somebody is influencing possibly from a commercial point of view versus when you have somebody with credentials who is giving them information. In this space we need to be able to look at information, decide what is genuinely needed and go from there. Going back to the point about high-quality evidence, it can be slow-going and expensive. A lot of the sports that we work with are frustrated because they say, “But we have athletes today who want to go to the next Olympics.” I feel there is an opportunity here for the sports and the athletes to do their own research. They will need some help to know what to capture and how to interpret it but I see that as a new role and opportunity for, I guess, traditional lab-based scientists to go out into sport and show the sports, the athletes, and the organisations how to collect meaningful data. While we love data that we can generalise, in sport one size rarely fits all. It would be really great if we could train the practitioners and the athletes themselves to have that body literacy to generate their own data and interpret it. When we have female physiology right the way from school, the whole way through, and the female athletes know about those specific things—whether it is ovarian hormones, menstrual cycles, pregnancy, bras and breast health, or pelvic floor—they can then ask better questions. It is quite a nuanced area but in order to really serve these elite female sportswomen we need high-quality evidence.

It needs to be collaborative, as Kirsty alluded to.

For me it is the translation of that research as well. The evidence is growing and the translation into resources that can support sport and practitioners is needed at the same time. We were with a sport last week that said it had women coming into the elite level who had never had that support through the talent pathway, and even before that. They were arriving in the first England team without having any of that support. The translation of the research is really important.

From a theory-to-practice perspective and linking to what you were just saying, the role of an analyst within a high-performance sport environment is to collect data via video and then present stats back to athletes and coaches in meeting rooms or on a one-to-one basis. There are a number of research papers that have evaluated the perceptions of athletes and coaches within male environments, and there is limited research that has looked at the perceptions of females within those environments. When you talk about the challenge, the gap and the barriers that there are at the moment at university level or in club environments, we are using research that has being collected on male participants and we are trying to transfer it into an environment where it is a fully female team. The barriers of that are that the team of males might have been well-paid full-team players with support behind them; they have a bigger infrastructure. You then come to an international-level netball team or even a domestic netball team and they are athletes that have other jobs or they are parents. Do not get me wrong, there are males who are parents in other environments, but they have other roles as well. We are trying to transfer this information around how we are going to deliver this feedback to you: “Well, we’re going to sit in this meeting room and we’re going to deliver it like this.” They might need information to be presented on their phones so they can look at it on the bus on the way home, or it might be on an online portal so they can watch it after the kids have gone to bed. When you talk about the barriers of simply just providing or delivering feedback, we need to make sure we are not just generalising the information, that this is how we would deliver it to a group of male athletes or players, and we need to make it a little more personalised to female athletes based on what the barriers are and their other commitments.

Thank you, that is very good on the impacts and some of the drivers. Is a driver of this gap related to the way the research is funded and, particularly, published? Who decides what research happens and what research is published on, say, the gender ratio in decision-making bodies, editorial boards and so on? Does the ratio between men and women impact what research is commissioned?

I think so. As you say, if we look across journal editorial boards from the editor-in-chief right down to the reviewers, women are not as represented. When some papers go to these boards, journals, reviewers and editors there is a lack of understanding. I keep circling back to this point that if you are not educated about these things it becomes really difficult to then review and understand that paper, whether it is publishable and what the impact will be. I bet we all have strong feelings about the publishing system in academia; I think it is somewhat broken. It is not just a lack of women in these positions; it is a lack of overall understanding of how good these papers are when they arrive. That can be really difficult. Just to give that light and shade: I have been heartened to see that some journals have now implemented policies which at the point of submission ask, “I can see your study has been conducted in men. What is the reason you haven’t done it in women?” While it is good that they recognise this, it is a bit late then because the study is already done. We need to ask those questions when the study is funded or when it is conceived. We know there are challenges and barriers for women to take part in research, but equally we published a study last year with colleagues in Australia where we had done quite a few studies all exclusively with female participants and at the end, we asked them, “Did you enjoy taking part?” They unanimously said they enjoyed it. Again, it is a biased group, isn’t it? They were already somewhat motivated to take part in the research and went on to enjoy it. How we pull all these threads together is going to be interesting.

You are not a politician; you are critiquing a good news story, which is a bad thing for a politician. Just on that light and shadow part, what areas has there been real progress in? Where would you say there is real progress in closing some of this gap, and what is the learning from that?

In physiology we have seen a big increase in studies around performance and health injury. That has been a really good step forward. Would other colleagues like to comment on their specific disciplines?

I am going to put my darkness to your light, Kirsty. As a team we have been discussing life course research, looking at women at all points of their physiological journey, and the changes along the way. I am a social scientist and I am very keen to ensure that our research participants are not just white, elite, middle-class athletes, and that we represent underserved groups. We had a discussion last week about the representation of Muslim women in research and that was linked to a question about clothing, and actually moderate clothing. Of course it is not just beneficial for those women who have to cover up during exercise; there are quite a lot of women who do not want to wear particular clothing. There are underserved groups of women. Beyond performance, there are other angles around women in research such as wellbeing and the psychosocial elements. Back to my point about the translation of that research, there is still a big gap there.

I appreciate that probably a lot of our perspective has been geared more towards senior athletes. I do a lot of research with youth women’s football and the barriers are probably slightly different; they are probably exacerbated or compounded. In terms of infrastructure, if we talk about the data gap, maybe senior populations already have infrastructure and are collecting data from a performance perspective. You have a starting point but actually within the youth populations there isn’t that same level of infrastructure, resource and support and it requires you to potentially physically go to clubs and venues. It is expensive, time-consuming, labour-intensive, and it is really difficult. From a funding perspective for football performance, there are probably very limited places you can seek funding from. It is probably slightly different from a health and injury perspective but it is a real challenge. There are some really good ideas and avenues but physically getting the data is a real challenge. In the east of England in particular we are not in a hub of women’s football, for example. It is maybe an hour and a half of travel to get to a venue and they finish at 10 o’clock at night. How can you send a student up the A12 to do that? There are lots of things to consider and it is important not to just think of the senior elite. When we talk about the full pathway there are probably different challenges to consider earlier on as well.

At the beginning of this section, Kirsty, you talked about international collaboration and data sharing. Is there a country that is excelling in sports science research focused on women?

I feel that we are.

Do you feel that we are the leader?

From my perspective there are probably three to four countries that are really pushing this agenda, and we are one of them. I collaborate a lot with the Australian Institute of Sport. Our colleagues there have a real appetite for this type of research as well. This is also a high-priority agenda for colleagues in Canada and America. I want to speak a little about our European colleagues as well where I see some fantastic collaborative, consortium-type studies. Coming out of Spain we have the IronFEMME project; coming out of Norway we have FENDURA; we are starting to see a lot of research. As I say, I can only speak for physiology and at that senior performance level but we are certainly among the countries that are most active in this.

There is an openness in terms of discussing things within the UK Sports Institute. There are always different nuances on it, and we probably should do more in sports in terms of using the same methodology and data collection, and the power of actually having more sports. The number involved in any one sport is a very small pool to work with—for example, in hockey we have 33 female athletes and 33 male athletes. Whatever we see as trends, it is prone to error in terms of the numbers that are involved, so there is a strength in terms of sports pooling together to get the numbers up. Obviously there is some variability, and this is the difficult bit in sport; Kirsty will probably comment more on this. We have a very close alliance with rowing because we are both based at Bisham and I work quite closely alongside their athlete health lead. But the sports are very different, going from one that is majorly physiological to one with a team sport aspect. A lot of the team sports at international level have very different separate governing bodies—for example, cricket, Red Roses and the FA. They are very different but if you look at the Olympic sport aspects, the upcoming LA games with lacrosse and tag football coming in, if we can get it right in terms of timing there are some opportunities for us to collaborate very closely with those groups.

Not many of us have money in Olympic sports; there is no money for those types of things at the moment. If we go to UK Sport with a very definitive performance question and plan, and there is somebody with some aptitude in terms of understanding who wants to help in that particular domain of interest, then you are more likely to get funding. Otherwise the funding goes back to the sports to fund it. As I say, I fight to get two or three lots of bloods a year; there is no money there to do the things that perhaps we would like to do. I have painted that quite negatively; there are some big benefits in terms of working within the UKSI in terms of the intellect that is in the system and how we can rely on world experts. Kirsty knows this very well in terms of the work across the female athlete health structure. There are some big opportunities there but I would say we are limited, and because we have had to restructure it has probably delayed the focus in terms of what the research questions are for this cycle.

From a performance point of view in the domain that I work in, we do not have a large pot of very good athletes to work from. If you are selecting 16 for an Olympics and you have 18 with the reserve group and you lose two key players, your ability to be able to really strive in terms of those medal performances becomes far impacted. In women’s sport we certainly know that there are some aspects of association between low energy, availability, and illness and injury and we are trying to do our best to offset that in understanding more around how we generally screen and profile. So we are better: we have more understanding in terms of what we know from the literature and we are more on the front foot rather than just treating the bone stress fracture that we might see. We could be better from a performance point of view but from the grassroots point of view it equally has lots more questions to answer, and I will leave you guys to answer that.

It also comes from a benchmarking perspective. If we are looking at our athletes in our systems now and are unable to benchmark certain levels of performance of where they are at the moment, how we progress that moving forward becomes challenging in terms of what we need to do in order to be fitter, faster, or changing tactics in terms of certain areas that I focus on in analysis. As well as that there is an impact on our growth through that sport. Looking at our academies, our next-gen leagues below it, or even our university teams that feed into certain sports and leagues, we also will not know what benchmarks they need to hit because we would have essentially missed a period within this progress or agenda of what and where they were at that particular time.

Absolutely. There is always that danger of slipping back into previous times when women exited sport to have children, if we are not supporting them to have their children during their career. If they are more likely to get injured and we are not looking into the mechanisms behind that, they are, again, going to exit because they are injured, and that injury puts them out for such a long time that they just do not come back. There are lots of concerns here. It means that we hold women and women’s sport at a much lower level and we never see the growth and potential that women are capable of. Even if you boil it down to maybe quite a jaded viewpoint about medals at the Olympics, we are probably going to start to even lose that medal tally. Right up at the competitive level, if you want to be that niche, we are going to lose medals right the way through. It is not just performance; it is health, injury, the sustainability of the career, and what they do after their careers. We have to be careful that we do not push women out of their careers broken in pieces, with issues around fertility or anything like that. Without funding research and without continuing to support all aspects, not just the research aspects but every avenue in women’s sport, we are in real danger of starting to see this hold and potentially a drop again.

If we are saying the research or the data is only at the top and that support and provision comes later in the pathway, whether it is from an educational, lifestyle support or performance health and wellbeing perspective—whatever aspect you want to look at—that is surely going to be more detrimental.

It is a question of what is the talent we are losing at that early stage along with, as Kirsty said, the hindering of athletic development and long-term health risks. My understanding, as we have alluded to, is that other countries are catching up with us in terms of those marginal gains at that elite Olympic performance level. It will be really interesting with LA because the UK used to be leading and others are catching up with us now and the gap is closing. Were that funding to stop we would definitely go backwards.

That leads us on nicely to the next section, which is on kit and equipment designed for women.

Thank you everybody for coming to give evidence this afternoon. Apologies that I could not be here for the start of the session; I was particularly upset about that because this is an inquiry I am very interested in. My background is in sport and health and fitness, professionally and personally. I am a proud hockey player of 30 years. I am now a proud member of the women’s parliamentary football team and the tennis all-party parliamentary group. I am not particularly good at any of those things but I am very enthusiastic.

Don’t believe it; she is very good.

Participation of women and girls in sport and physical activity is something that we need to take much more seriously at every level, including through Government. Looking at kit and equipment designed for women, research from 2023 showed that 82% of female football players at top European clubs found that their football boots were uncomfortable. From your work on this topic, Alice, what is your assessment of the current availability and quality of football boots for women and girls?

This is a research area I have quite recently moved into. Personally, I actually played futsal and part of the provision was our league was given women’s boots from a provider. Anecdotally, our team wore them and four people rolled their ankles on the first night. We said, “Oh, that is really interesting because actually you would think if they are made for us that would not happen.” That was a few years ago, and that is how I eventually ended up in this area, to bring more science back into it. There are increasingly more boots available. We have Ida, for example, which is a women’s-only brand, and Adidas and Puma have released female-specific boots. Where we are with the research is that the issue we have is there is no empirical independent evidence in relation to what the impact or influence of those boots is while manufacturers may claim, “Okay, wear these; they will reduce your injury risk.” We have seen that on websites. We are not sure if we can really say that quite yet because we do not even know if they make a difference in the way that female players move. We are currently conducting a study that has been funded by CIES FIFA research scholarship. We cannot share the findings just yet because we are under a little secrecy but keep an eye out for this space. This study is looking exactly at the impacts on movement mechanics from different kinds of movements—straight-line running, cutting, jumping and landing—if we have unisex boots or female-specific boots. From that we can start to infer whether there are potential or higher risks of injury with one boot or the other. There are some available and it is increasing, which is great. Hopefully it is not just, “Shrink it and pink it,” and they are genuinely being made for the anatomy of the female. Again, we need independent empirical evidence to really understand the impact of that and actually, if we do move differently, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Can we just take players who have worn male or unisex boots all their lives and put them in women’s boots that might impact the way that they move, and is that a positive or a negative thing?

It is great that you are doing that research but it sounds as though you think there is a gap in the market for further research when it comes to this issue.

Yes, there absolutely is. We are a very small drop in the ocean. We are almost doing the first thing to do—almost a descriptive, “If we wear one boot or the other, how does that change the way we move?” As I said, the next steps need to be around whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, and whether there are long-term implications to the way we move.

Do you think there is a contribution in terms of boot design to the higher incidence of ACL injuries among sportswomen?

Yes, that is the kind of thing we are trying to understand. There are certain movement variables or indicators that put athletes at higher risk or put them in more risky positions for ACL injuries. As I said, we are not quite at liberty to say whether the female or the unisex boots make a difference, but part of our investigation question is actually, is this a good or bad thing? Is it something we need to look at?

Are you satisfied that the current pace of progress is fast enough, or could sports brands, governing bodies and universities do more to accelerate the progress, not just in terms of boots but maybe other female-designed kit?

Yes, collectively we can. From a collaborative research and commercial perspective, that has to be done with female athletes in mind around understanding perceptions, problems, and what are potentially prominent issues. That does not just come from boots. As you said, it could also be from a social perspective in terms of white shorts and the kit design from that perspective, and actually kit regulations, rules and implications; there is lots that could potentially be done.

I suppose there is an intersection there. As someone who had a school uniform that was brown and spent PE lessons in brown gym knickers, I actually cannot believe I am not more scarred for life than I am and that I carried on playing sport, to be honest. It is quite unbelievable. There is something around PE kit as well that we probably need to look at. I am going to come on to Kirsty.

Before you do, Kim, I just want to ask Alice around the price point of these. Is there a massive difference between unisex or men’s sports equipment and football boots that they design for women? Is there a big price difference here?

Typically there isn’t; they are typically at the higher range. If we imagine there is a spectrum of boot quality, or levels, typically the women’s boots will be the higher range. For example, the boots that we are testing are £220 each. Even from a research perspective we need to go out and buy x number of boots but that is not cheap, so we go back to funding, supporting, and looking into things. For an athlete, if the implication is women’s boots are good, we would probably need to think about the accessibility of that as well.

In terms of, say, somebody who is not as good at sport as Kim is who wants to just give it a go and wants to go out and get women’s boots, do you think that is something that is out of the reach of most people for grassroots sports?

It will be manufacturer-specific. As I said, Ida has a range of options because it is a women’s-boots-specific brand. However, the leading sports manufacturers that we think of—Nike, Puma, Adidas, whatever it might be—typically tend to be in the higher range.

We all have different perceptions of price, so what is the higher range?

As I said, probably £220 up.

Did you say £220 up?

Yes. It is expensive for a pair of boots—if you want to spend money on boots.

There are football boots—we are just going to stick with football boots as the example—that are at a lower price range but they are all for boys and men. Why are we not seeing lower price ranges for women?

I am not sure if that is across every brand and model, as I said. Every manufacturer will have multiple models and there will be women’s there, so I do not know. Part of the rationale for wanting to do this project, when we put the funding application in, was the claims that they were making that it will reduce injury risk. If you are staking really big claims on that, it probably encourages people to want to buy them and spend more money. That is my personal opinion in terms of how I perceive that but there is that attractiveness to it.

I just wanted to find out because when you said, “Shrink it and pink it,” that quite often just increases the price. We have seen that with everything.

Just the size of the boot, not the price.

It sounds as though you are doing amazing work in this area, Alice, but it feels to me as though we are still dealing with a lot of male-focused research. Based on your work, Kirsty, do you think there is any evidence that some of this has contributed to poor health and injury outcomes for women in sport because it has been based around men?

That is a big question. I am not sure if I can answer it, but what I can say is that injuries are multifactorial and it is rarely possible to point to any one given thing and say that that was the leading factor. When it comes to women’s sport it probably is not one thing by itself but it can be that death by 1,000 paper cuts. If we do not understand 10 or 15 of the 20 or 30 contributing factors in women, then that is where our risk is increased. You have obviously mentioned ACL injuries and that is a real hot topic at the moment. We are all looking for that one silver bullet to say, “This is the thing that is different for women,” but I am not actually sure that is true. I am really interested to hear what Leanne might say about this in a moment, so I will open the door for her to come in around this idea of the gendered environment. There was a really nice study published a few years ago that took all of these concepts. From my perspective, people say that oestrogen causes ACL injuries; somebody else might say it is the football boots; somebody else might say it is the pitch surface, or the size and shape of our pelvis. Then this paper came out a few years ago talking about the gendered environment, and it said, “Well, it is likely those things contribute.” But actually if you zoom out and look at the opportunities and make that direct example between girls and boys, if a girl gets her first football at 10 years old, for example, it is likely that her counterpart at 10 got his football at two years old. The girl has a coach who does not have a licence or much experience—whereas the boy has his licensed coach. She is training on this pitch; he is training on that pitch. When you add all those things together that is probably the bigger issue and comes back to some of the bigger ideas and concepts. It is a really difficult story and to unpick it would oversimplify it. I agree that if we continue to over-rely on exclusively male models or male data, then we lose those nuanced pieces around whether there is a contribution of ovarian hormones, or a contribution of biomechanics, and pelvis, boots and all these things.

Probably the whole principle that connects what we have talked about today is that sport has assumed the male body and male standard as a default, and we have often awkwardly borrowed that architecture from men’s sport. You said it really well, Gemma, that we need the evidence for all this, and better products require better data. Of course sports engineering research requires knowledge of users, and very similar to sports science research, in our sports engineering research only 7% of participants are female within that. So that mirrors the sports science research and goes back to what we said earlier: the testing and data collection methods are not inclusive, and do not attract and build trust with women to come into that research. Going back to the question that you asked, Sarah, about who is doing it well, when we are talking about product design, engineering and technology, the UK is a leader in the field of sports engineering but, as was identified even in that Institution of Mechanical Engineers report from 2023, there is so much scope to go further. When we talk about inclusive design it is probably mainly around para-sport, disability and the design of products in that way. That is right but there is scope to go even further, such as cultural and gender differences as well. There is scope to segment populations further and it is just as important as what we are doing to question who is asking the research, and how we design it and do the work.

That is really interesting. Again, we could apply that to many aspects of society when it comes to gender equality; we could certainly apply it to this place and the world of politics. It is brilliant that you are all here today but what is your view on the impact of having female representation in sports science roles such as some of yours, academic-wise and practitioner-wise, on the health and participation outcomes for women and girls in sport? We talk a lot about seeing the actual athletes, but what about the roles in the research world, do you think that aspect is important?

Role models are imperative. They are so important, whether that is in a practitioner position—we talked earlier about clubs letting individuals in to see the infrastructure: the team behind the team in terms of your psychologists, physiologists, and so forth. That is equally important from an academic perspective so that students, whether they are from college, school or university, can see the progression and the career options within academia, not just from a practitioner perspective or going on to do those particular roles, PE or further education. If they can see careers in higher education that is really important. We alluded earlier to the importance of open days. It is vital to get an equal representation of males and females to speak to parents and families. Equally, it is important that it is bigger than that; it is going into schools and colleges, advertising more widely and removing this idea that there are no roles for females within higher education because there certainly are. Within our team, specifically with performance analysis at the university I work in, there are more female than male academics. That is important, and we see students come to open days asking questions around the breakdown of female to male students, and equally the female to male staff ratio. I am not sure if I have quite answered your question, but role models are vital.

I was really fortunate recently to do a BBC Bitesize documentary about periods. It was terrific because in this—I think it was about an eight-minute documentary—we had some schoolgirls talking about periods and their potential impact on taking part in PE at school. We had me as a boring, older academic talking about the research, but giving some of that evidence, some of the science that sits behind it. Then we had Beth Mead from Arsenal giving her perspective as an elite female football player. That was a really nice mix and a really great way to show role models from sport, from university research giving that science voice, and from the girls themselves. It took real courage for these girls to come on and be filmed talking about periods and what that might mean for taking part in PE. It is really important that we have these role models. I have been really heartened by watching a lot of the athletes themselves. Did you see the Persil campaign about, “Every stain should be part of the game”? When you see those female athletes talk about periods in such an open way it is just ground-breaking in this moment. Alice has mentioned the younger generation a few times. I am really happy and excited that they are growing up in a time when periods are no longer stigmatised or a taboo topic; let us see what they are going to bring to sports. Hopefully they are going to challenge and push us further to do better to accommodate these female-specific considerations.

This is my final question. It is brilliant that you are all here today doing your bit but I get concerned about what the Government are doing. I am not entirely sure that successive Governments have ever really understood the value of sport and physical activity—full stop, if I am being honest, but particularly from a female perspective. What is your view on the effectiveness of the Government’s women’s sports taskforce as a means of sharing best practice and ways to address health and physiological barriers facing women in sport? Who wants to take that one?

I do not mind taking it. I love that it has been put on the agenda. It is there, visible, and obviously then a priority, which is brilliant. It has lifted it up and given it the visibility that we have talked about today, which is so important. As a spin-out from that, the Health Collective is brilliant. There is so much scope to expand in terms of talking about major events and how we can leverage those, but I would like to see the scope of it go much broader, deeper and higher. There is so much scope. You have some really good people on that collective who are immersed in sport day in and day out, so it is only a good thing. The challenge now is how to scale it.

Do you want to add anything, Emma?

No, not from me.

We would just all agree. We want more, please.

We have a good start, but we need more.

Yes, absolutely. We are not there yet, not by a long shot.

I am not the athletic one so I am going to focus on funding, particularly for research and how you can access that. Let me start with a very general question: how accessible is funding for research into women’s sports sciences? Kirsty and Leanne, you probably do more applications than the others, and Gemma probably.

It is hard to come by. There is just not enough funding to go round and to do everything that we are speaking about here today. I will be honest: the majority of the funding that we have at the Centre of Excellence for Women in Sport actually comes from the sports themselves. For example, we have what we call match-funded PhD studentships. The sport pays half the studentship and the university then matches that so that the PhD student has a dedicated three to four years to undertake research with that particular sport. That has been a really good and fruitful model. We have had success with UKSI, Arsenal women’s football team, and More than Equal. I do not know if you have come across More than Equal. It is on a mission to find the first female Formula 1 driver. It has funded two PhD students in order to help support that, and the drivers are teenage girls aged around 13 or 14 years old, and it is working with them to bring them through. It is fantastic when the sports can contribute but of course the model that I have described also requires investment from the university. I joined Manchester Metropolitan University four years ago, and at that time it had newly formed the Institute of Sport. The Institute of Sport is a pan-university identity. That means that it—I do not know if hoover-upper is the best term—pulls on all the strings across the university that relate to sports, physical activity and exercise. Our colleagues in sport and exercise science are clearly our biggest contributor but we also work with colleagues from the law school, the business school, digital, arts—all these things. When I joined, I loved the idea of an institute that went across all the disciplines, and the university said, “Actually, we want to make women and women’s research a priority.” So within about 18 months of joining the Institute of Sport we founded the Centre of Excellence for Women in Sport. That was two years ago. We were the first of its kind to launch and have that university backing and investment. Every time I come to it and say, “This sport can go half, can you go half?” it is very willing to do that. We have now seen other examples of universities giving that investment and visibility to really prioritise this agenda. Going all the way back to the question that you asked me, getting money from sports relies on relationships, who you know, and getting into those organisations. It can be hard but in terms of wider funding it is very scarce and difficult.

Are you basically very dependent on private sector funding, in many respects, to kick-start things or get the match funding?

Yes. Similar to Kirsty, I am very fortunate to work at a Loughborough University that is fully behind the women’s sport agenda, and that makes a huge difference. I agree with Kirsty that there is money in sport but it is smaller scale and it depends on your relationships with governing bodies in sports. That is where we get most of that funding from because we know we work very closely with sports. If you want that larger-scale funding from research councils, Horizon funding, and so on, it is really tricky. We are exploring options at the moment and you end up having to almost stretch the focus of your work. If it is around female health you have to almost hide the sport angle and become about women’s health. My work is around women who work in sport and we were looking at funding around women in broken labour markets. That was really stretching the focus of sport and almost slightly hiding it there because there was still the age-old feeling that sport is perhaps not as credible, which is changing now. We are seeing an increased awareness and endorsement from research councils such as the Wellcome Trust about women’s health, but the sport angle is still lacking and you are dependent on targeted calls. For example, Horizon did a call last summer around gender-based violence in sport, which we went for at Loughborough; you are waiting on those calls. For some universities, particularly perhaps post 1992, the state of higher education and the capacity to do the work is a huge issue as well. Similar to Kirsty, at Loughborough we have a lot of support from colleagues and engagement with the agenda but you are dependent on that.

In that scenario of having to choose, what are the main factors that seem to influence whether something gets funding or not?

Do you mean from the funder’s perspective?

Yes.

The credibility of the institution is still a huge thing, being able to demonstrate networks and, in the case of Horizon, having the European networks, of course. The application and innovation is really important, and you have to really think through the impact of the work, which is a good thing and is highly valued, so you have to really demonstrate that. It is very competitive; there are a lot of people out there looking for similar calls.

Do you rely a lot on partnerships with major sports organisations but also commercial providers?

Yes. We are exploring the commercial relationships a lot; it is something that we have a history of doing well at Loughborough. We are seeing that change: commercial partners are coming in and saying, “Look, we are interested in this problem. Of course, given Loughborough’s status, we would like to explore that with you.” That is a mechanism through which funding could be sourced.

Do you feel that commercial providers have equal concern about women as men? Or do you feel it is very biased in any way?

The women in sport agenda is a very hot topic right now, and so they are very much behind it.

Does anyone else want to comment?

I probably cannot comment in terms of research. I would probably add, as a caveat, that as academics, research income is obviously a very big thing for our own personal career progression. Given the way higher education is going, the need to bring in money to get promoted and progress is important. As Leanne and Kirsty said, it is incredibly competitive. Particular elements, for example performance, would have less opportunity to receive funding than maybe the health and wellbeing perspective, and there are less criteria requirements to meet for funding, so it is more restricted and makes it harder. The challenge of working in women’s sport and all those other things we spoke about earlier makes it even harder to do research. There are compounding things. It is obviously just slightly off topic, but the impact of the research funding on those of us who are trying to research actually has implications for our own progression. At times I think, “God, this would be much easier if I just went and worked in men’s football and did this research,” because I would get the funding and I would be able to go through. I do not want to do that but you have those moments and those thoughts.

Before we move on to your next question, Nia, Kim has a specific question about research funding.

I just wanted to ask about the commercial aspect, particularly for the research that you are doing, Alice. Do you get buy-in from the big sporting brands like Nike, Under Armour and Adidas? You are potentially helping them to create products that they are going to be able to sell, so do they provide any funding for this sort of research?

There are instances in previous research where support has been provided. For my specific project, we wanted to be independent and have that lens so we chose not to go down that route. You can have in-kind support or collaboration; there is that support. But again, it comes to the issues of whether you know how to get into them and how to navigate that. Do you have the credibility? Are you in the right institution with the right experience? Do you have previous records of demonstrating income and achieving? There are lots of things that come with that.

I understand the balance there between ethical considerations.

I would like to finish up with the idea that an awful lot has been done about the barriers and that most of the focus now should be about finding solutions. Do you agree with that view? Does anyone want to make any final comments on the discussion so far?

Absolutely. The way forward now is to look for those solutions. I always die a little inside when I read the headlines that a female athlete has said, “I lost today because I was in a particular phase of my menstrual cycle,” or, “I was on my period and I had these symptoms that hindered my performance.” It blows my mind that today we still do not have solutions. Rather than just accepting that some women have physical and emotional symptoms associated with their menstrual cycles that are potentially hindering their performance, why are we not offering solutions? That would be the next step for me. We have come through a natural progression. Obviously, we had to start talking about these topics and recognising their importance, but the next steps are around those solutions. What is in place within our sporting system to make sure that if a woman comes forward and says, “This is my challenge. This is my barrier,” and somebody says, “Oh well, never mind—that is just part of being a woman,” that somebody says, “Well actually, if it is this problem, here is the solution,” or in the absence of this little recipe book of solutions, that somebody says, “Let us trial different things”? I absolutely agree that we need to push into the next steps now. I think it was Kevin who mentioned this data gap, which gets a lot of headlines, but I would love to see some headlines around, “This athlete won a gold medal while menstruating,” and really praises her support staff for having the information and data but also the wraparound support in terms of the culture to support her journey. We have seen instances of that but I would like to see more of it, so I completely agree that this solutions viewpoint will serve us better.

To Kirsty’s point, I went into sport because I thought sport pushed the boundaries. I have been a career physiotherapist; I still do some NHS work. The work that I do within elite sport I pass through to my sports medicine clinic in the NHS. So if you get sport right and push the boundaries very well in the sporting arena, it comes back to the health of the nation. We focus too much on illness now and not enough on performance and health, and that includes across the population: that is illness prevention.

I would like to ask you about safeguarding, Leanne. You mentioned this briefly just now. Your research, Women in Sport, found that 91% of sports organisations have safeguarding and reporting mechanisms in place but they are not consistently effective in supporting victims from harassment and abuse. Why do you think that might be, and what do current approaches lack?

We found that we have the existence of policies. When we spoke to leaders, they said that they have x, y, and z policies in place. Brilliant. When we spoke to the coaches, they either said that they were not aware that they existed, or if they were aware that they were not going to report through those. There is a huge trust gap in sport from women—in this case women coaches—towards organisations. While the policies may exist, I, as a coach, may not feel that if I did report that it would be dealt with competently, quickly, and in the right way. We have under-reporting. We were talking about it recently because we do quite a lot of work with Kynisca, and if we get this right we might see a huge spike in reporting cases. That is okay because that means that the process and the system is working. For me it is not the existence of a policy; it is the fact that we do not trust it. This is largely because a lot of coaches were telling us the people they have to report to are either their line manager, or friends with their line manager, or because of the way that the system is set up—perhaps that they are reporting to a small organisation or club where there are only a few people. There is almost a triangulation effect there, so we need more impartiality, more independence in that process and more accountability through that. If I report a case of harassment, I want to know that it will be dealt with, these are the steps that will be taken, and this is the action that will be taken. But we have a lot of blurry lines in terms of accountability and low trust from our coaches.

What might those effective policies and processes look like? How might we practically get trust into that system?

The first step I would suggest is the awareness that these policies exist and, as I said, this is what is going to happen if you report it. It goes back to the independence. My suggestion would be that it has to come out of the sport and go through an independent channel to be dealt with properly, as often the people who are investigating are perhaps close to the case themselves.

This is the final question before we get out of this incredibly hot room. I have really appreciated that you have all had your hydration breaks, which must be standard now; it is good practice. What advice would you give to the next generation of women and girls hoping to build a career in sports science and high-performance sport?

There is a bit of pressure going first; you have time to think if you are further down the panel. We need to modernise sports science careers and academic careers. We need to change and show that to work in elite sport you do not have to be an elite athlete. As a mum or an auntie to other young people who I work with on a weekly basis back at university now, it is important to say yes to opportunities. I am a big believer of saying yes to get into a chance to work with high-performance teams and high-performance players, coaches and so on. I equally think we need to understand the impact of saying yes all the time because there is a limit where you can say yes too much and people will keep coming and asking. My biggest bit of advice would be that you do not need to be an elite athlete to work in elite sport. That also goes down to grassroots. Even if you do not have experience of the sport you want to work in, or the career that you want to work in, you can certainly learn the trade through experience and saying yes—but not too much.

Sarah, as you asked that question I made a note of what somebody who is a leader in sport asked me last week. He said, “Do we want to work within the current environment, the current ways of working and constraints, or do we want to challenge that system?” My answer to that would probably be, as is the way that sport works, that I would go and get myself a lot of experience. I would knock on doors. As Gemma said, I would make myself available—not too available—and, as a woman, I would not offer to make the notes or the coffees. I would go in and get loads of experience working in sport clubs. I would also make relationships. If I look back on my career, the one thing that has been the most important thing to me that has also supported me the most as a woman working in sport are the quality of the relationships. You know what they say: well-behaved women rarely make history. I would just keep challenging all in a good way by asking some good questions.

We very rarely have well-behaved women in the Women and Equalities Committee.

It is actually hard as you go down the panel because you have heard so many great things that you want to repeat. I would add to what has been said already and maybe say, “Stop asking for permission.” I would really like girls to believe that sport, in whatever guise that is—whether it is sports science, sports medicine, nutrition, tech; any aspect of sport—is for them. You are right: you do not have to be sporty in any way. The science is there; it is often swallowed in sports science, but if you are interested in science, it is an incredibly interesting aspect of science and something that is different. I would say believe that sport is for you, recognise its diversity of roles, and stop asking for permission.

To be the difference takes hard work and commitment. Don’t be knocked back if you make mistakes, and really just keep going with that commitment. It is hugely fulfilling but it takes time to get to that fulfilment bit.

Is there anything left to say? I echo what has already been said. I am a very firm believer in diversity. Voices in a room, perspectives and experiences only enrich the conversations and what we do. While you may not look as if you should be in a place, you very much should be. The other thing I would say is go and challenge and push; it is not just advice from us but maybe reflections on ourselves. You do not have to be the sole person who comes in and drives that change. There are others, those who have been before, who are here now and have governance over things that lead. We have accountability and responsibility to make sure that you can be here. Essentially, do not be scared to come in, but you do not have to do it all on your own. Surround yourself with good people who probably know what is best for you.

What a perfect example of not doing it on your own, right here. A massive thank you to you all for your time, your expertise, and your evidence today.