Richard Taylor

Raw Deal for Boys from Cambridge Summer Activities Programme

Parkside Pools, Cambridge

I recently noticed advertising for summer holiday activities for children at Cambridge City Council’s sports facilities:

  • Girls are offered dance sessions, netball, hula hooping, “boxercise”, “bootcamp” and indoor cycling – most at £2.50 a session.
  • Boys are just offered £1.30 off the price of a swim between 2-4pm on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays (applies to under 16s only).

I am shocked at the disparity in what’s being offered and the unfairness. I think publicly supported opportunities should be accessible to all without discrimination on the basis of gender.

See: Parkside Pools’ “For the Girls” webpage and their summer junior activities page.

As I’m a resident of Cambridge and these activities are being advertised with the City Council logo and are taking place in City Council owned buildings I tweeted my views publicly. I would like to try and persuade our elected reps the current arrangements are wrong and should be changed. The councillor responsible, Labour’s Richard Johnston, responded saying:

Nothing sinister in this. Targeted sessions to encourage greater participation in sport by young women/girls who are less likely than boys to be active and involved in sporting activity.

Cllr Johnston provided a link to information on the ‘For the Girls’ initiative.

Being active is good for individuals’ health, including mental health; and healthy individuals are good for society.

Significant numbers of people, adults and children, are less active than the Government’s scientific and medical advisers recommend is desirable on health grounds.

There is a disparity between genders in the UK in this area; females are less active than males, and also take part in sport less.

It appears that those in power have decided that because there is a gender disparity in the statistics on activity levels and sports provision there should be gender based discrimination in their response. I don’t think that necessarily follows.

What I think people like Cllr Johnston are missing is that many of the factors which act as barriers to participation in activities by some girls will also apply some boys; even if they disproportionately impact girls. What I think we should be doing is tackling those identified barriers irrespective of gender.

I suspect there may have been a case of our leaders recognising the gender disparity in activity levels, concluding something must be done, and seeing the programme of activities just for girls as “something” and therefore going ahead with it. I suspect considerations of fairness and unreasonable discrimination based on gender were not given the weight they deserve.

Gender discrimination is a controversial subject. Some are in favour of positive discrimination aimed at equalising various statistics which show a difference between genders; be they schemes for getting more women in Parliament, board rooms, or scientific careers. I think these are universally misguided and fail to appreciate that the underlying barriers can affect people across the gender spectrum.

Single Sex Activities

Often when discussing something people will use a technique of arguing against something you have not said. In this case there has been an attempt to imply I oppose single gender activity sessions. This came despite me being explicitly clear with my views:

Yet one response was:

Another example of arguing against something I’ve not said has been:

Are the Public Sector Filling Gap in Provision?

One possible justification for the inequality in provision for boys vs girls in the publicly supported programme of activities at Parkside and other Cambridge City Council owned venues could be that the state is filling a gap in what’s available – and there are other, perhaps private, or charitably run activities on offer for boys.

If this was the case I would suggest pointers to the activities for boys from the places where those for girls are being promoted.

Nicky Shepard from Cambridge has stated: “Girl’s [sic] sport needs funding, boys sport already has it” and “there are a number of youth provisions for Boys or general sport activity in Abbey” however when I asked what those provisions were I got no specific response.

Seeking View of Cambridge City Council Contractor Greenwich Leisure Limited

Male Chauvinist Pig Slur

As a result of publishing my view that it is wrong for girls to be offered a much wider array of publicly supported summer holiday activities than boys in Cambridge this year I have been attacked. Liberal Democrat Ex Cambridge Executive Councillor Colin Rosenstiel, who is a committee member of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign, the city’s largest membership body, publicly decried me as a male chauvinist pig.

Entering debate about how we run our society is challenging and these kind of accusations do I think set a much higher hurdle to participation than is desirable. I’m quite used to this. I have, along with another local activist, suffered the same attack from Rosenstiel previously just for commenting on a councillor’s attendance record – something I regularly report in respect of councillors on the basis solely of their role and if they are present or not.

I would prefer a quiet life and not to be attacked but I also think it’s important to speak up when I think things are wrong.

Research on Gender, Activity and Sport

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee of MPs published a report in 2014 noting:

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal found that only 38% of seven year – old girls were achieving the recommended amount of physical activity, compared to 63% of boys.

Girls’ activity declines between Years 4 and 6 at primary school, with this decline becoming more pronounced in Years 8 and 9. The same is not true for boys, meaning that by the age of 14 only 8 % of girls meet recommended activity levels of one hour a day. [Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, Changing the Game, for Girls] This has fallen since 2008, when 12% of girls met this level compared to 32% of boys. [Health Survey for England – 2008: Physical activity and fitness – 2009]]

By the age of 16, less than a quarter of girls, compared to 37% of boys, play sport three times a week (Active People 6); and by 18, 65.9% of men play sport at least once a week, compared to 41.0% of women. [Assertion in DCMS submission]

(I’ve followed the references to link to the sources).

It’s notable there are two distinct things referred to in that paragraph, activity and sport. Activity includes things like walking and cycling to get around; and sport includes fishing. The research is based on surveys and in respect of some of the activity statistics on subjects wearing accelerometers.

The report by MPs also notes:

Sport England has identified the main barriers to participation by women in sport as:

  • Practical/lifestyle barriers (such as having children, changing jobs, moving house; time and cost including childcare costs; family responsibilities)
  • Personal/emotional barriers (Not knowing anyone/wanting to exercise with a friend; belief that muscular and sporty bodies are not feminine, not wanting to look silly)

Richard Taylor

12 responses to “Raw Deal for Boys from Cambridge Summer Activities Programme”

  1. Local activist and school Morley School governor Antony Carpen who tweets as Puffles2010 said he was fine with the programme:

    He also suggested government cuts might be a reason the offerings were limited to girls:

    Reply

  4. Shockingly, I can’t see the problem. If it increases participation in sport/other physical activity by young women that’s fine by me. I rather think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill on this occasion.

    Reply

    • I think there are often ways of addressing a problem which we shouldn’t use because they are unfair or unjust. We have one here with the array of activities offered only to girls but not others. Another example is sending arsonists on seaside holidays. We may be able to reduce crime by giving holidays, training opportunities, housing and more to criminals but when deciding what action to take I think we need to consider fairness and justice.

      When elected representatives says it’s only the outcomes that matter sometimes I disagree, and think the approaches also need to be fair and just.

  5. I think the key point here is that activity levels for boys and girls are both less than recommended. Closing the gap doesn’t solve the health problem in this situation, whereas with other kinds of gender gap the inequality itself is the issue.

    I think you can target girls without excluding boys. You can advertise in places girls are more likely to be, or you can lay on activities which are more likely to appeal to girls. But if a boy wants to play netball and doesn’t like football, his enthusiasm and participation in sport is at stake if excluded.

    That’s not to say there isn’t value in single-sex groups, but the provision in this scheme is very unequal. However if it is true that there is already a disparity in provision, then I think that would justify it, as that would be evening it up.

    The only other thing that occurs to me is that because girls participation is lower, interventions might be better value for money. You need a smaller proportion of a larger group to be engaged, so overcoming one problem faced could have larger consequences. But I think you’d need more information on the issues and how to solve them to be sure of that.

    Reply

  7. Cambridge City Council’s Executive Councillor for Community, Arts and Recreation responded to my comments at the East Area Committee. He said:

    I should make it clear right now that I make no apologies for the project that we’re putting in place thanks to GLL and Sport England funding.

    It’s quite clear that this project is not to discriminate against young boys in sport. It’s meant to address the gap in participation in sport with young girls and for them to take part in a form of sporting activity.

    We’re simply enabling a level playing field which currently does not exist in the city and elsewhere.

    The data is there and in-fact Mr Taylor’s blog states, and he links to a DCMS report in 2014 which noted that only 38% of seven year old girls were actively achieving the recommended amount of sporting activity per week compared to 63% of boys. And that means half as many young women at sixteen to twenty-four participate in sport so there is a significant problem, a significant issue.

    The specific point by Mr Taylor about the dance classes is now … I spoke to the head of arts and recreation this afternoon and she told me that the reason why there are specific classes for girls is that they were requested. Boys from our research and our past experience are not as interested in dance classes as much as girls and we believe that having these kind of sessions would be more likely to encourage participation and motivation to be more active in sport.

    Also at the meeting the chair of the relevant scrutiny committee Cllr Sinnott promised to look into the matter and write to me; and the meeting’s chair Cllr Blencowe noted that the offerings at the leisure centre were only one part of the city council’s activities for children over the summer.

    Reply

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    Reply

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