Demotivation can come from being active, as when the Brazilian skater and Olympic runner-up
Rayssa Leal
is told that she will not be able to combine sport with her studies, as if from passive: "Look at yesterday's basketball game in Tokyo, the Korean team I had a coach, we had a coach. It's always like that.
Men are trained by men
(never women, why not ?!) and women ... also by men. If you are a girl, you don't think that the coach is a Women's work, you only see men doing it! "
With this, one of her many reflections on the scarce presence of women in almost all levels of sport,
Pilar Calvo,
general secretary of the
Association of Women in Professional Sports (AMDP),
forces us to broaden our perspective when addressing an issue that For worrying, it worries the very
WHO
: the enormous rate of
abandonment of sport among adolescent girls.
A new study has come to show us, in addition, that the situation does not improve, despite the much vaunted 'rise' of women's sport ("when we are in Spain, only family members come to women's water polo matches," she complained during the broadcast of the Spain-South Africa one of the commentators of RTVE).
Included
in the
BasketGirlz
project
, jointly developed by the
Spanish Basketball Federation, Endesa
and the
Higher Sports Council,
the study has been carried out precisely to find out the causes that lead many young girls to abandon the practice of basketball.
How bad is puberty!
The research reveals that the transition from primary to secondary, the age group
12 to 13 years,
is
one of the most critical moments
for the abandonment of sports practice (around 6% of boys and
13% of girls they leave all sports
in that time). But in the case of
girls
, the decline is sharper when they are
16-18 years old
(seven out of 10 girls have left the sport when they reach the age of majority, according to an investigation by
the San Joan de Déu Hospital, Barcelona,
endorsed by the Higher Sports Council).
Why do so many girls drop out?
The BasketGirkz study points out four major variables:
time management, family, motivational climate
and
gender inequality
.
"The multitude of activities that young women have at their disposal compete in attractiveness with sports practice, as well as social recognition and support from their environment. That
is
why
the role of family members
and
coaches
is essential
in order to avoid abandonment of basketball ", they explain from FEB.
In need of mirrors to look at
"There is a lack of references, in all spheres of sport. They lack visibility, also in all spheres," Pilar Calvo denounces. The fact that there are few women, also in the decision-making bodies of sport, among managers, organizers, contributes to the fact that there is very
little sensitivity
regarding
what would make sport attractive for girls,
and very little motivation to introduce changes.
And that there are many, many clues, such as those offered two years ago by a study carried out based on thousands of surveys by the
Mapfre Foundation
in collaboration with the
Rey Juan Carlos University
of Madrid entitled 'Young woman and physical activity': the girls They see sport from a more practical point of view and give great importance to the
social component of the activity,
a factor that the current sports offer does not satisfy. On the other hand, they are
less attracted than they are to competitiveness and violent exercise.
, central in the most practiced (and supported) sports, such as soccer.
And finally, the girls are less motivated because they do not perceive that there is a great social acceptance of sportswomen.
We return to the initial reflection of Rayssa Leal and Pilar Calvo.
A mess, come on.
AN EFFORT TO KNOW US BETTER, WALK ...
That boys and girls look to sport from totally different mentalities is a fact that is clearly being ignored, and that is key to understanding their abandonment.
Because there is a reality that weighs like a concrete hat: being a man or a woman, apart from what genetics, the brain or hormones have to say, is a
social construction.
Femininity and masculinity are not built in solitude, it is enough to read
Elisabeth Badinter
to see it crystalline ('XY. The masculine identity', Editorial Alliance), but they are 'woven' throughout our passage through all
areas of socialization
that go through our lives: family, school, gang, partner, work ...
And so, while sports,
belonging to the club,
the team, the competition itself, have been
integrating rituals
for men for
centuries
(that sports practices are initiators in the acquisition of virility is no mystery and that the child 'weird' has traditionally been the one who did not play soccer at recess, either), the girls have never had anything like it (at most, a parallel can be drawn with
ballet
, a much more elitist activity and where work in equipment is very blurred).
WITHOUT MOTIVATION THERE IS NO TRIATHLON
Come on, girls have never felt
more feminine
or more
integrated
into the club of
women of the future
when doing sports, which is why they have not felt as much
motivation
as boys to practice it. And they abandon it at that moment in life in which you are wishing, precisely, is to become a one hundred percent woman.
Oh, but the adolescent abandonment is only the prologue of the slow but
unstoppable departure from sport
that occurs in the following years and whose reasons are very clear to Pilar Calvo: "The main reason why women abandon sport is that they cannot make it
their livelihood,
both during their sports career and afterwards. You hardly see women coaches, judges, referees, presidents of clubs or federations, so there comes an age when they consider the future and know that they
have to study, because they will not live on sports
".
Even Simone Biles,
who is studying Administration and Finance,
knows it
...
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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