Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee on the important topic of women in sport. My name is Wendy, and I'm very fortunate to have been involved in sport my entire life. Both my parents were professional athletes. My father played professional hockey for 20 years, and my mother was a professional figure skater for numerous years and a high-performance coach. It's interesting to note that she's 77 years old, and she actually retired from coaching at the high-performance level at the age of 75. So she is certainly an exceptional role model for me.
I personally have been involved in numerous roles in sport. I've had the advantage of seeing the system through the lens of being a high-performance athlete, a national team and Olympic coach, a parent, and now the CEO of a major multi-sport organization as well as a volunteer chair of the board for the Canadian Sport for Life Society.
As I was preparing for my remarks today, I took time to reflect on what it has been like to be a woman in sport in Canada. Gender equity in sport has been a topic as long as I can remember over my 35 years in sport. My sense is that we are a leader in the world in terms of policy and recommendations, yet somehow we seem to fall short on the actual execution or implementation of these recommendations and strategies. Although we have made some progress, there is still room for us to grow in this area.
To prepare for today, I reviewed a recent report by CAAWS called “Women in Sport: Fuelling a Lifetime of Participation”. I'm not sure if the committee has this report. I can certainly email it to Jean-François after. In this report, I was certainly struck by a few key statistics that stood out to me.
First was the statistic around national sport organization board member representation, currently at 26.3%. As well, NSO, national sports organizations, board chairs are at 17.5% female. For MSO, multi-sport service organization, and NSO senior staff—at that level we seem to be doing a little better—the number is 33%. In terms of coaching, which is near and dear to my heart, only 17% of Canada's Olympic coaches at the 2012 games in London were females. I don't have a breakdown on the statistics from the recently completed Rio games, but I'm sure the Canadian Olympic Committee could provide those statistics for you. When I look at those four key areas, we're certainly not operating at the level that we should be in this area.
I can speak from my own personal experience as a national team coach about how difficult it has been as I've tried to balance my career with my family. I coached at the highest level, coaching professional tennis players ranked in the top 10 in the world. This required travel on the pro tour on average 35 weeks per year. I did this for 13 years, and I can tell you it was a real challenge to do so while balancing the needs of my young family. Fortunately, I have a very supportive husband who I've been married to for 35 years and counting. Coaching at this level with one child, then two, and then three was nearly impossible. At some point, something had to give. When my husband and I realized we had four weekends together as a family in an entire year, we knew we had to make a change.
I was very lucky that my national sport organization, Tennis Canada, and the pro athletes whom I coached were extremely supportive during this time when I had a young family. They allowed me to reduce my travel schedule to spending a much more manageable 10 to 15 weeks of the year on the road at just the major events, so I would go to Fed Cup, to the world championships, and to Wimbledon—the grand slams. I would send my assistant coaches for the other 20 weeks of travel. I ended up switching my focus to the daily training environment in Toronto, where I would train the athletes who were at the national centre. That also gave me the opportunity to work with the next generation and the young juniors, which I absolutely loved.
What's really important about this is that I did not have to reduce my salary to do this. Again, my NSO was very supportive. I think it is very important that we create opportunities for women with more flexible choices at different points in their career, and it's even more important that these flexible arrangements not impact salary levels. We need to find better solutions to support women in sport at all levels. Young girls deserve to have strong female coaching role models.
In 2013, I visited Rene Simpson during her last few days in palliative care, which left a lasting impression on me. Rene was one of the professional players I had coached for over a decade. At one point she asked me if I realized the impact I had on the players I had coached. I asked what she meant, and she went on to comment that every one of the top professional players that I had coached were now involved in coaching as a career themselves. She commented how interesting it was that each of them pursued a career in coaching and, in her opinion, none of them would have done so had I not been their coach. This is something I will forever be proud of.
Where to from here? How do we hold the sport system accountable to achieve the goals of gender equity in sport? Let's start by moving the dial on three key areas that I feel are important in high-performance sport.
The first one I spoke about from the statistics is gender equity right at the top, which starts at the board level. Is the current 26% good enough?
Second, let's examine the NSO budget allocation by gender for programming. Are the budgets equal? I can assure you that when I took over as director of high performance for Tennis Canada they were not, and that was the first thing I changed, and rectified the budget for men's and women's programs.
The third point is to recruit and hire more coaches at the national team, provincial team, and CIS level. We need to put in place a creative and flexible program with incentives to hire female coaches. This program could be funded through AAP, the athlete assistance program, to recruit recently retired athletes. I know that Lorraine will probably speak to that, but certainly this is an area that we've discussed together in the past .
In closing, as Prime Minister Trudeau so aptly said, “Because it's 2015” when questioned about his new half-female cabinet, well, it's now 2016 and it's time for us to lead the way with gender equity in sport in Canada.
Thank you.