Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, and I am the CEO of the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity, commonly known as CAAWS. I will be using that acronym going forward. I'm joined by Karin Lofstrom, the former executive director of CAAWS, and an internationally recognized expert on women in sports today.
CAAWS's vision is a Canadian sports system that is equal and fair for girls and women, in which they are actively engaged as participants and leaders. Since its founding in 1981, CAAWS has been the leading voice for girls and women in sport in Canada.
We must start by applauding the committee for initiating this study. It's a topic that we are very passionate about. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of 30 years of leading thinkers and practitioners across Canada, there is still much work to be done.
As Mr. O'Regan commented, we all celebrated the success of the women in Rio. However, it would be a mistake to take that as an indication that equality has been achieved, and we hope that it won't in fact be a distraction from that.
Unfortunately, as you can see in the report that we circulated in advance, women's participation is not improving and remains lower than men's across all measures.
As a few examples, female sport participation, en masse participation, has been falling since the 1990s. Adolescent girls in particular drop out of sports at a very high rate, which is a huge issue in fact. Their sport participation at that age is a primary indicator of their participation on a lifelong basis. Female representation, as we've heard, on boards of directors, in paid leadership roles, and in technical roles, remains stubbornly low.
Our work focuses a lot on identifying what the barriers are to this. What we've discovered is that this is not a matter of girls and women not being interested or not being capable, but rather of them having no choice but to participate and to compete in a system that often fails to address their unique needs and interests, and in which they are at times made to feel unwelcome.
The barriers are complex, and Canadian Heritage and other departments have taken some important steps to help address them with us. We believe there is more that can and should be done, and, of course, CAAWS is here to help.
We would like to put forward a few recommendations that you, as a committee, ask Canadian Heritage to take action on as priorities that would help to bring about this equitable sports system we are all aiming for.
We recommend that sport organizations funded by Canadian Heritage receive clear criteria to meet and are held accountable. There is a commitment to gender equity through the women and sport policy of 2009. However, there are no targets, nor are there any consequences for failing to address persisting inequality. This ultimately conveys the impression that the Government of Canada is indifferent.
Sport organizations need a business case for change. Accountability introduces an effective motivation for finally taking action on this issue.
As a second measure, we recommend measuring and publicly reporting on the status of women and sport in Canada. The data we have is fragmented, unreliable, and inconsistent, which is an obstacle to establishing a benchmark against which progress can be measured. We recommend that Sport Canada require that all funded organizations provide their data on a gender basis so that we can see, for each measurement they are tracking, how many women and how many men there are. That then becomes the basis of a report that could be delivered on a recurring basis to help provide key insight to the sector and draw the necessary attention to this issue.
Finally, we recommend that there be increased support for sport organizations to rise to the occasion and successfully implement gender equity measures. We know, from our long experience working with sport organizations across the country, that they all need better access to education, training, and guidance to build their capacity to create quality sport experiences for all girls and women—including further under-represented groups—and to create conditions that will help foster the pipeline and the achievement of women in leadership roles.