Thank you for the question.
Yes, it's true that women and girls participate at far lower rates than men and boys. As referenced, we have research that shows that during adolescence—those teenage years—girls who are playing drop out at a rate of one in three from sport, while boys stay in sport and drop out at a rate of one in 10.
The question as I understand it is, what's going on? At the end of the day, it's complex and multi-faceted. The girls tell us that the most important factors for them are things that come up around access to sport. Girls still don't have the same number of opportunities and ease of access to play, for sure, but they also talk about quality of sport.
Sport has been designed by men for boys and men historically, so all efforts to include girls and women in sport are remedial. It's retrofitting. It's “bolting on”, if you will. It varies from sport to sport, but sport is still largely led by men. Even sports dominated in participation by women have largely male coaches. If you look at sports like ringette and others, you see that they're really defined by men. They are designed and delivered through a male world view, and girls are saying that it's not working for them. They don't feel like it was designed with their needs and interests in mind. It stops being effective for them.
They also talk about things like safety. They talk about bullying. They talk about real struggles with body confidence and body image. In sport, your body is on display, and people are constantly interacting with it.
It's a multitude of factors, but what we ultimately have girls saying is that this is their discretionary time, their out-of-school time and their away-from-other-friends time, and sport ultimately isn't serving them.
Of course, safety is very much part of that. When you talk to girls about safety and when we talk about maltreatment broadly, it's not just about safety from sexual abuse and sexual harassment; it's psychological safety and emotional safety. It's safety among their peers. It's safety with the adults in the room. Looking at that holistically is really important when we start to think about solutions.