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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