This is a really important question, something that I'm quite passionate about because, as the mother of a 5-year old girl and a 16-year old girl, I've lived the experience of my daughter losing her love for sport. We lose girls around the age of 14. We need to build systems and we need to create experiences for them where we won't lose them.
One of the things Sport Canada does is fund CAAWS, the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity, to the tune of approximately $250,000. CAAWS works with national sport organizations and multi-sport organizations basically to increase awareness about how we can be more inclusive with women and girls in our sport experiences.
It's very interesting to me because of the 1,900 or 2,000 athletes we card through our athlete assistance programs, 50% of them are women. At that level we have a 50% representation in sport.
What's happening? How is it that we lose them, but then at the high performance level we seem to have them? I'm interested in figuring that out and it's something that we're turning our minds to as we look at being more inclusive.
The other piece I'd like to talk about is your comment about the kind of sport experience our girls are having. We need to be creative and inclusive. We need to provide integrated opportunities where girls get to play with boys, but we also need to respect the fact that some girls like to play with girls and that the experience is different when you play in a girl's league than when you play in a co-ed league.
The more the variety and the range of sport experiences we can provide our girls the better. We need to be mindful not to lose them.
What kind of good sport experience will keep them in the game longer? We know, as I said in my opening remarks, that by a certain age they're no longer experiencing sport at the same levels as boys.