It’s Women’s Health Week! A few months ago I was approached by Megan from Centre for Women’s Safety and Wellbeing about co-hosting a podcast for Women’s Health Week focusing on women in sport. The idea being that we would shift away from some of the more standard topics that are covered for Women’s Health Week. We had a couple of chats about it. We hoped to talk about the benefits of sport, physical, emotional, mental, look at how sport can be a connection point. Sport facilitates belonging and community.
Megan invited Kate Fielding to be our guest. Kate has played Basketball at local, state and national levels and now she plays AFL (Australian Football League) at a local level. Kate was a part of a local women’s AFL team that brought home 3 premiership trophies. We thought Kate could speak about her experiences in sport and the exciting changes to women’s sports that Kate has seen from the limited number of sports available to girls when she was growing up to the options for girls now.
I hadn’t expected to here about the systemic barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion that Kate experienced in her previous football club. No change facilities for the women’s teams, no toilet paper in the women’s toilets, having a ‘women’s rep’ on the board, a board member comparing their appearance to performers at a local strip club, and not even hanging their premiership flags or photos!
It is 2022, I was not expecting to hear these stories.
Despite all of this Kate still loves sport and her passion is infectious.
Thank you Kate for sharing so openly and thank you Megan for co-hosting (especially the parts where you asked the sports questions that were WAY out of my scope of knowledge!)
I really enjoyed this episode and, as a result of the conversation I just had a conversation with the chair person of our board about DEI and ways we can do better.
If you want to find out more about what Centre for Women’s Safety and Wellbeing are up to you can find them here https://cwsw.org.au/
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