The Western cultural crisis

A pretty common factor in politics today is a growing pessimism about the future, with many pointing to uncertain economic and environmental factors as the reasons behind this. A new article from one of my favourite modern cultural theorists however points more directly at the role of Western culture as the route cause of our growing pessimism.

In his piece Whatever Happened to Western Civilisation Richard Eckersley looks back at a piece he wrote 20 years ago called The Western Cultural Crisis to see what’s happened to Western culture over the past 20 years.

In the piece, Eckersley says that despite some increases in happiness, the last twenty years has seen a growth in pessimism in Western society. He states:

In contrast to people’s high levels of personal happiness and life satisfaction, many studies over the past few decades have revealed their anger and anxiety about the changes in Western societies. The concerns include excessive greed and selfishness, consumerism, too much competition and too little compassion, the loss of community, growing pressure on families, and drugs, crime and violence. There is a common perception that, with individual freedom and material abundance, people don’t seem to know “where to stop,” or now have “too much of a good thing.”

Eckersley argues that these cultural realities in Western culture led to an unrelenting pressure on individuals to perform, and to be selfish:

These cultural shifts toward excessive materialism and individualism are not just a matter of greater vanity, selfishness, and greed (although many people express concerns about these traits), or simply the manufactured desire to “have more stuff.” They lead to an unrelenting pressure to focus on what we make of our lives, to fashion identity and meaning increasingly from personal attributes, achievements, possessions and lifestyles, and less from shared cultural traditions and beliefs.

The drive of selfishness and greed, Eckersley argues, isolates individuals, putting everyone in competition with each other. As he explains:

This emphasis (on the individual) is a recipe for disappointment, depression and anxiety. It distracts people from what is most important to well-being: the quality of their relationships with each other and the world, which, ideally, contribute to a deep and enduring sense of intrinsic worth and existential security.

What Ecksersley’s article therefore is creating a an argument against the growing individualism of Western capitalist society. What’s interesting about this though is that it takes a cultural approach to Western capitalism, rather than using the usual economic (i.e. the exploitation of works, growing inequality) or environmental (i.e. growing materialism, environmental destruction) arguments. This creates an overarching argument that says that whether you are at the top or the bottom of the economic scale, Western Capitalism has a negative impact on your life.

These ideas are not necessarily revolutionary, but they provide an interesting analysis of our current society, but also on how we work to solve the problems we face. Eckersley argues that the only way we can change our society – make the world more equal, increase happiness, protect the environment etc. is to change our culture. As he says:

I believe that we need to change Western culture: the stories, symbols, and metaphors by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals – and so our politics.

What’s interesting about this is that this often doesn’t happen in modern social movements – many use an approach of running campaigns that fit within modern culture, rather than trying to change it.

Eckersley takes a look at modern science for example. Science, which many use as a change agent in our society, is also heavily based on the individualist, rational ideas that Eckersley argues is building into our cultural crisis. Science often ignore the cultural elements of our society that many people find so important to their lives – the things they genuinely connect to (i.e. religion).  Ecksersley said he hoped that this was changing, but it has gotten worse:

I saw hope in a growing compatibility, a reconciliation, between scientific and spiritual views of the world. Instead, we’ve seen a backlash by scientists and others against the rise of religious fundamentalism, some of it as “fundamentalist” as the religion they denounce. It is “a dialogue of the deaf,” says Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton.

To me, what this is, is a call to understand, accept and work with the cultural realities of our world. To change the world we can’t disconnect people from their culture and their desire for community. In creating change movements based around individual action focused on rational science we are potentially deepening the void between the values that we seek and desire and the people are trying to reach.

Dealing with culture and values is essential to solving many of our problems. Eckerlsey provides a convincing argument for the growing cultural crisis in the Western world and some food for thought on how cultural changes will play a role in solving modern problems.

Ten stories we could be talking about instead of the AWU

Here’s ten stories from this week that we could be talking about instead of the ‘AWU Scandal’:

1.) A tipping point in the melt of the permafrost in the Arctic that will have global climate consequences

2.) The opening, and likely failure, of the Doha Climate Conference

3.) The introduction of the NDIS legislation 

4.) The passage of legislation to excise Australia for migration purposes

5.) The passage of legislation to ensure the final stages of the roll out of non-sniffable fuel to areas affected by petrol sniffing.

6.) An apology to victims of abuse at the ADF

7.) An apology to victims of forced adoptions in Queensland

8.) An agreement by Eurozone Finance Ministers and the IMF to bail out Greece

9.) Reports of the withdrawal of troops in parts of Congo after 7 months of fighting that has lead to 500,000 people fleeing their homes

10.) The exhuming of the remains of former Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat to investigate whether his death was due to poisoning.

But hey, instead we could talk about a ‘scandal’ where no one has yet proven any wrongdoing and will probably have no real impact on people’s lives, real policy, nor on the career of our Prime Minister. That could be fun.

Murray-Darling health dependent on water extraction levels

Originally published in Crikey, 27 November 2012

Four of the world’s great river systems, including the Murray-Darling Basin, are suffering significantly from reduced water flows. A new report shows that water extraction has the biggest impact on the health of a river.

One of the report’s authors, Dr Jamie Pittock, told Crikey: ”While climate change will aggravate changes in flows in river systems, current high levels of water extractions remain the principal contributor to reduced flows and degradation of these rivers.”

The paper, Global insights into water resources, climate change and governance, was published yesterday in Nature Climate Change. The study was conducted by ANU researchers Professor Quentin Grafton, Dr Jamie Pittock, Professor Tom Kompas, Daniel Connell and other colleagues from around the world, who looked at the health of the US Colorado River, the South African Orange River, the Chinese Yellow River and the Murray-Darling River system.

You can read the full article at Crikey.com.au 

 

Gay men will marry your girlfriends

Last week (or maybe the week before) this video was being tweeted with quite a flutter.

Gay men will marry your girlfriends

It’s probably worth having a watch of the video if you want to read on. After I finally got around to watching it, all I could think was what’s all the fuss and excitement about? It’s either a little offensive, or if not, just bad. In having debates with friends on Twitter, I’ve started to take a stronger stance – I think things like this are actively destructive.

When I was young and was starting to realise I was gay, there were two major public faces for homosexuality; Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (I used to watch Queer as Folk as well, but that was much more niche). Will and Grace and Queer Eye were in many ways big steps for the representation of the gay community (noting that I’m using the word gay here as there were no lead LBTI characters in either show). Moving from a place where gay men had very little to no representation at all, these shows really brought gay men into mainstream media culture.

Despite this progress however, they also presented a very limited representation of gay men; that of the stereotypical ‘fabulous’ camp gay man. Stereotypes about gay men being effeminate have been around for a lot longer than before Will and Grace and Queer Eye. But these shows, and much of the other representation of gay men around the time, brought these stereotypes well into a mainstream culture, and importantly actively built them up. They used the stereotypes not in a derogative manner, but in a positive way.

To add some extra context into this, this representation coincided with a bit of a ‘mainstreaming’ of the GLBTIQ movement. Whilst queer activists had been campaigning for centuries, you can really see a ‘break out’ of the movement around this time into the mainstream cultural conscience.

Will and Grace and Queer Eye therefore represented the way the straight community decided to represent gay people (noting that even though these shows had gay actors, they were created and set in a straight dominated industry) at the time that the queer movement was breaking into the ‘mainstream’.

In doing so, what was being presented was the ‘fabulous gay man’, who in general didn’t actually have sex (hence meaning we don’t have to think about that disgusting but sex) and is able to please women emotionally, therefore providing a service that straight men clearly couldn’t provide. These men aren’t really serious either – they’re funny, fabulous, a little one-dimensional and therefore is ‘un-threatening’.

Now, whilst this limited representation would normally just annoy me, it probably wouldn’t lead me to writing something like this if it wasn’t for the impact it had on the queer community, and movement. With the mainstreaming of this view of gay men, many in the mainstream of the queer community ended up hopping on board, with pretty bad consequences.

This is a really subtle change, but one that if you think about it has become all consuming. The key to this is the idea is that of these stereotypical men being ‘non-threatening’. At the time, instead of thinking ‘it’s great that we’re getting more representation, but let’s see if we can broaden it’, many went (not literally) ‘look at what the straight community love about us – let’s play into it to build our movement’ (for more discussion on this, check out this FUSE article I wrote a couple of years ago). We’ve bought into the stereotypes the straight community place onto us – allowing our oppressors to define who we are, and the reasons why we should have ‘equal rights’.

Now, I’m not saying that there is something wrong with people who fit this stereotype, or the stereotype itself. But, this particular representation of gay men is now so widespread it leaves out the whole diversity of our community; men, women, intersex and trans*. And there is something wrong if those who don’t fit this stereotype aren’t visible. Young queer people should grow up with a diversity of role models. Heterosexuals who are exposed to our campaigns should see the fullness of our lives. Gay men deserve freedom from discrimination and homophobia, no matter how well we fit the ‘fabulous’ ideal.

And because this broad representation isn’t occurring, many are now feeling pressure to fit within the mold that the straight community has defined for us. I can tell you from personal experience that many in the community now feel an expectation to live up to these sorts of stereotypes, with things like gym culture taking control of much of the gay community. Those who aren’t ‘fabulous’ get left out of being represented. For example, I have been told many times that you wouldn’t expect me to be gay because I ‘don’t act like it’. And this isn’t an expectation that is created by some conservative group, but one we create ourselves.

Even more importantly, the way we have built up the fabulous gay man has actively excluded many other in the queer community, in particular women. A large part of this is because the traditional stereotype of a lesbian woman is one who is butch – apparently not the ‘friendly face’ we want to show to the rest of the community. In doing so we have let homophobic society dictate how we represent our community, hiding some people while pushing others into the spotlight in a distorting way.

So, in the end, my annoyance about this video isn’t necessarily due to being offended with its content. Rather, it is real concern about where our movement is heading, and importantly, how the straight community (note that ‘College Humor’ is not queer-press) continues to represent the queer community.

In the late nineties and early naughties, when I was coming out, this sort of representation was in many ways the best we could ask for. 10 – 15 years later however, I was hoping we would have progressed. Whilst this video may be funny, it’s a symbol of how far we have to go.

Global Warning

Originally published in ANU Reporter, 23 November 2012

Without immediate action to combat human-induced climate change, we’re not only risking the health of our planet, but also ourselves. SIMON COPLAND reports.

Professor Tony McMichael is issuing a warning: not only will the changing climate affect our planet – killing our coral reefs and melting polar ice – it will also have serious impacts on human health. If we don’t learn from our past, and take action immediately, the future consequences could be devastating.

“The effects of climate changes in the past are really just a small taste of what we could expect to happen in the coming century,” says McMichael, a researcher at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population health, part of the ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment.

It’s safe to say that McMichael knows what he’s talking about. The world-leading epidemiologist was looking at the effects of climate change long before it was a hot topic.

“I have been interested in environmental epidemiology for around 40 years,” he says.

“I became especially interested in climate and health around 1990, when I noticed the increasing international concern about depletion of stratospheric ozone and the increased risks of skin cancer and eye disorders. I sensed that the rather more complex issue of human-induced climate change would pose even greater health risks.

“Participating in scientific and public discussion about climate change in those early years, however, made it very clear to me that we weren’t seeing the full picture. We worried about climatic impacts on river flows, polar bears and economic growth – but not the biological consequences for humans themselves.”

McMichael  is seeking a better understanding of the history of Earth’s climate and its impact on human health in his new book, which has the working title When climates change – famines, fevers and fates of populations.

“Early on, the main issue for human health and survival was finding ways to produce food,” he says. “People were continuing to spread out into new territory, so there was a lot to learn about what would grow and what wouldn’t. A lot of early health problems, such as undernutrition and starvation, arose from food crises that had much to do with fluctuations in climate.”

McMichael says the health impacts of human-induced climate change are wide-ranging.

“In public discussion, most people say, ‘ah yes, climate change and health, that will mean more heatwaves and floods and mosquitoes moving south’. Those are important issues, but they are just the tip of the iceberg.”

The rest of the iceberg is more difficult to study and foresee.

“For one thing, we are still in a relatively early stage of what is probably a long process of climate change,” says McMichael. “So it’s not easy to make the call and say, ‘that particular climatic event or that rise in the dengue fever cases in Queensland is due to warming’.

“The relationship between changes in population health and climate change is not as clear-cut as seeing the Arctic ice melt. For that, there’s only one explanation: the environment  is getting warmer.

The causes of human health and disease are much more complex.

“We need to look for consistent patterns.

“For example, we have studied various rural communities that have experienced the stresses of this last decade of drought. Episodes like that enable us to identify the typical adverse health consequences, including effects on community morale, mental health problems and impacts of extreme heat for outdoor workers.”

After 12 years at ANU, McMichael is moving from a full-time position to continue his work in ‘semi-retirement’ mode. In early November, this occasion was marked with a Festschrift – a celebration including a two-day conference. A commemorative book will be be published next year. The book will be a collation of invited chapters covering the topics McMichael has focused on throughout his career, with subjects including the politics of smoking and cancer and the health impacts of environmental lead contamination.

“It was a great honour to have my Centre, with support from the College and the University, put on the Festschrift,” says McMichael. “It took me by surprise when it was suggested, but it was a nice opportunity to draw together a number of threads from the work that my research group and I have done.”

Two such threads are his understanding of climate history and his passion for taking positive action to adapt to current fluctuations.

“It’s one thing to clarify the current and future risks to health, but it is also important to discuss the actions our society must take to avert those risks,” says McMichael.

“Human-induced climate change is already happening and we must take protective action. By far the most important, of course, is to curtail the problem at source by curbing greenhouse emissions.

“Other adaptations are relatively straightforward, such as near-term responses to the prospect of more severe heatwaves. Our studies of patterns of deaths in Australia during extremes of heat indicate that the ongoing temperature rise, with increasingly hot periods and heatwaves, is causing additional deaths.

“We’ve built our cities in ways that often maximise them as heat traps. That’s a problem, especially for inner urban populations: during a heatwave, not only do residents get exposed to the extremes during the day, but temperatures don’t go down at night. So we should have more green space, more ventilation, and better insulation of private houses and public buildings.

“We also need more effective early-warning systems for heatwaves, supported by media dissemination and greater local community attention to those who are old or frail and living on their own.”

Climate change also has implications for the spread of infectious diseases.

“We need improved surveillance methods for disease,” says McMichael. “For example, with warming, mosquito-borne Japanese Encephalitis could spread to Australia via Cape York. Increasingly, ‘sentinel’ birds are used as indicators: if the disease enters Australia, infection of these birds provides an early warning.”

Ultimately, McMichael hopes that his life’s work will help shape our future.

“There are warning signals from history for us to learn from. But we need transformations, not just tinkering,” he says.

Poor job as bad for mental health as no job

One of the great things about working at the ANU is that I get access to a whole range of research that I probably wouldn’t see otherwise. Today, this really interesting piece appeared in my inbox. It’s closely related to something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while and also gives me an opportunity to link to my work’s website, which I’m sure must mean I’m doing my job well.

Poor job as bad for mental health as no job.

For those of you who don’t want to read the actual story, the summary is quite simple. Researchers have found that people who have ‘bad working conditions’ have just as bad mental health issues as those people who have no job at all. This research, which was conducted in England, backs up previous research done in Australia earlier this year that said pretty much the same thing.

This is an issue I want to write a longer post on in the future, so I will keep it short for the moment.

For me this reflects really interestingly on the ‘jobs debate’ we’ve seen over the past few years. I have noticed that, probably since the GFC, much of our debate about the economy and workplace relations, has been focused solely on ‘jobs’ (of course this has always been a dominant issue, but it seems to have really crowded out everything else recently). It’s about the Government fostering an economy that adds jobs, and people having access to these jobs, at the cost of all else (the environment, workplace rights etc.).

Interestingly, we’ve seen that many on the left have played a major role in this process. We can see unions in Australia for example, who are now focusing much of their work on ‘jobs for their members’ above all else. In the United States, Democrats having been running for years on ‘jobs’, and it played a large part in the 2012 campaign (remember Barack Obama’s ‘jobs bill’). If you go back through much of the commentary for the past two years, you will see lots of Democratic criticism of the GOP having not introduced one ‘jobs bill’.

Now, I’m not saying that meaningful employment is not important for people’s well-being. But within all of this debate, we seem have lost that key word, ‘meaningful’. The jobs debate seems to have pushed aside the quality of life part of the debate. As this research shows, at least in the mental health arena, such a ‘jobs push’ may not actually have a real positive impact. People may have jobs, but that doesn’t mean a positive impact on their well-being.

Anyway, food for thought. Am going to do some more research on this one and try and write something up that is a bit more comprehensive, particularly looking at what the left’s engagement in this area means. Watch this space.

Climate change may not cause drought: new research

New research has questioned the consensus among many scientists that climate change is leading to a global increase in drought levels. The research has wide implications for how we predict the impacts of, and adapt to, climate change, concluding we need to take a much more regional approach to the issue.

The paper, Little change in global drought over the past 60 years, was completed by Dr Michael Roderick from the Australian National University, and Dr Justin Sheffield and Professor Eric Wood from Princeton University. Conducting an extensive review of data, the team found that global drought levels have not significantly increased over the past 60 years.

Roderick says the trend can be seen both globally, and within Australia. ”Our new model shows that over the past 60 years, we’ve got a slight increase in drought in eastern part of Australia and a slight increase in drought in the south-west. However, we also have a very large decrease in drought over much of South Australia, Northern Territory and the top half of Western Australia,” he said.

“Under previous research methods, some places in Australia increased and some places decreased, but there were a lot more increases than decreases. Under our method, they balance out.”

The research comes to this conclusion through questioning a drought measure used by many scientists called the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). Named after Wayne Palmer, PDSI was developed as an agricultural monitoring tool in the 1960s to help the United States government allocate aid to drought stricken farmers. PDSI looks at the moisture of the soil (and hence agricultural drought), through calculating a simple balance between precipitation, evaporation and ground run-off.

As global climate change has accelerated, this method has been used by many scientists to calculate the effects it will have on drought levels. However, it was never intended to be used for changes over time. Despite that, it has been the preferred option by many as the data on rainfall and temperature were readily available. Yet, Roderick says that as new meteorological data has become available, PDSI has proven to be inaccurate. He says that it is too simple, in particular in calculating evaporation levels.

“The use of the PDSI has led to a bias in results that indicated an increase in the area of global drought where none has actually occurred,” Roderick said. “What they’ve done that’s incorrect is that they’ve assumed that water would evaporate faster if the temperature went up.”

Roderick says there are far more important impacts on evaporation levels than increasing temperature. Their new model takes into account the underlying physical principles of evaporation. In particular, it looks at the impact of sunlight, humidity and wind, which Roderick says are generally more important for evaporation than temperature.

By including these measures, the team was able to conclude that PDSI dramatically overestimated global drought levels, and these levels have in fact not increased in a statistically important manner over the past 60 years.

This doesn’t mean however we’re out of the woods when it comes to the impact climate change will have on drought. In using their new method, what Roderick and his team found was that changes in drought levels are far more regionalised. This means that in some areas we may see a significant increase in drought, whilst in others we will see the opposite occur, with significant increases in moisture level. This matches the growing consensus in the climate community that while climate change will present a global trend of increased temperature, the drought impacts of this may well be highly regionalised.

For example, in a paper released earlier this year, NASA scientist James Hansen stated that we could already see the impacts climate change was having on what is known natural variability (the localised variations in weather on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis). Hansen pointed towards the European heat wave of 2003, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year as examples of the impacts of climate change that we can see right now.

Hansen’s conclusion was that while we were seeing a trend of a global increase in temperature, at a regional level this translated into more extremes of both heat, and cold. The Princeton-ANU paper shows that we can see a similar trend when it comes to drought, with little global trend, but significant regional variations.

This makes for a much more complex picture for climate scientists and the community. Roderick concludes this is a challenge we will need to meet in order to get a better understand of climate processes. ”It is important that we gain our perspective of the impacts of climate change based on the best physical understanding of processes possible,” he said.

Exploring the fundamental nature of the universe

“You’re exploring the fundamental nature of the universe.” That’s why Jacob Hughes says he enjoys studying physics. “I think that’s quite a cool idea that the things that you are doing are universal. You can find out things that are really fundamental to everything that happens.”

Jacob is studying Honours in Physics. His research is looking at electron scattering.

“We create a beam of electrons from a source of some kind, in this case a wire. Then you use those electrons and you fire them at a target. In this case it will be gas targets. Then you detect the electrons which come through the other side. The change in energy that these electrons have from when you produce them from the source tells you something about the target.”

“This research is potentially really important, as electron interactions with gas targets are a primary interaction in plasma. Understanding how these interactions work therefore is really important for understanding the whole plasma process. The work I’m doing therefore can help with plasma technologies, which is the next big step for clean energy.”

Jacob says he came to the ANU because it provided a unique opportunity to research into an area as important as this, and to do so using experimental techniques.

“I took a year off last year, but then came to the ANU as I knew it was a good research facility and it offered programs I was interested in.”

“One of the great things about it is that the experiment I’m doing is a different method from “traditional” methods in this area. It’s kind of a new look at electron scattering.”

“It’s exciting to be able to do research into such a new area, using such a unique technique.”

Say no to homophobia in sport

“I’d like to tell you what it’s like being a gay footy player. I’ve experienced homophobia in Aussie Rules Football first hand – now it’s time to end it.”

That’s what twenty four year old footy player Jason Bell had to say when launching his petition to tackle homophobia in the AFL. The petition, being run through change.org, called on the AFL to run No to Homophobia ads during the AFL Grand Final and launch a Pride Round in 2013.

Bell’s work is shining a light on a major issue in the sporting world. Wherever you look, whether it is in the social leagues, or in elite competition, queerphobia is still rife.

Homophobia pops its head up everywhere it seems. Recently St. Kilda AFL player Stephen Milne was recently fined $3,000 for calling a Collingwood player a ‘f*&%n homo’. This follows the controversy former player Jason Akermanis caused in 2010 after he wrote an opinion piece calling on gay AFL players to stay in the closet. Akermanis said that the sport wasn’t ready for people to come out (as far as I am aware, no AFL players at the top league have come out as of yet).

A report in 2010, Come out to Play, showed that of the 307 surveyed LGBT sportspeople in Victoria, a whopping 42% had experience some form of abuse due to their sexual identity. At the time of the release of the report Dr. Caroline Symons from Victoria University’s School of Sport and Exercise noted that this didn’t just affect GLBT participants. She said:

“While GLBT people are likely to experience homophobic discrimination in sport, it is important to note that you don’t have to be gay, lesbian or transgender to experience it… Straight people perceived as gay are just as open to discrimination and homophobia.”

The likelihood of this is that many GLBTI people are either avoiding sports or hiding their sexuality when they do participate. Some of these statistics are stark – of 11,000 athletes at the London Olympics for example, only 22 were out. That’s a tiny 0.2% of the Olympic competition. Those who then do come out often face the potential of intense levels of abuse, possible issues with teammates and sponsorship.

I am a lucky sportsperson. I play ultimate Frisbee, social netball, and go to the gym, and am comfortably out in all of these spaces. But for many it’s not like this and
we can all help to make things better. It’s not just about being open in sport yourself. It’s about standing up to those who are homophobic, whether it is full on abuse, or just a little joke or taunt. This is a job not just for queer people, but for straight people as well.

In August, the AFL launched the ‘No to Homophobia Campaign’. Featuring Andrew Demetriou, Eddie McGuire and Lauren Jackson, the campaign will include a year-long social media and TV advertising plan to tackle homophobia. In 2011, former Australian hockey player Gus Johnson tackled the issue of homophobia straight on in a YouTube clip called “Gus Johnson: The Reality of Homophobia in Sport.” In the clip Johnson publicly outed himself and emotionally discussed the impact homophobia in sport had on him as a player. Straight players such as David Pocock from Rugby Union have also taken an active role, with Pocock taking public stands on issues such as same-sex marriage.

Governments are acting too. Here in the ACT, a $272,000 new program was launched early in this year to stamp out homophobia in sports, which will include a full time project officer to identify and break down barriers that may inhibit participation in sports and develop resources to assist clubs to foster a culture of inclusiveness and to respond to discrimination when it occurs.

At the close of the 2012 games in London we celebrate the achievements of the 22 out Olympians and celebrate athletes everywhere who are making a difference in sport as we aim to eradicate homophobia everywhere.

Women in sport

The 2012 London Oylmpics was billed as the “women’s olympics”. For the first time ever women made up half the competition and represented every county competing at the games. As we look back at London, it’s worth asking, how far have we come when it comes to women and sport?

There’s no doubt that women have historically and significantly had less financial and institutional support; participation in major games like the Olympics has been lower than men’s up until now and in general women’s sport gets much less coverage. It’s undeniable that the athletic feats of women are underrated – it seems men are considered better at sport and more exciting to watch.

This is slowly changing however. Women are taking many higher positions when it comes to sport. For example, Australia’s Sports Minister is Canberra’s own Kate Lundy. Women are now entering the boards of some of Australia’s top sporting agencies, such as Sam Mostyn at the AFL  Commission, Catherine Harris at the NRL Commission, and Alisa Camplin, who is not only an Olympic Gold Medallist, but also an Australian Sports Commission board member and director of the Collingwood Football club.

Women sports players are also making a more obvious impact on the national sporting scene. US Open Champion, Samantha Stosur is now probably one of Australia’s best known sports people, whilst Sally Pearson and Anna Meares were probably Australia’s two highest-profile gold-medal winners in the London Olympics. Potentially more importantly, for the first time in a number of years, it was a woman, Canberra’s own Lauren Jackson, who was Australia’s flag-bearer in the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

Queer women are also leading the way when it comes to the promotion of GLBTI sports people. 19 out of the 22 out gay and lesbian sportspeople in the Olympics were women, including Australia’s beach volleyball played Natalie Cook. In 1981 women’s tennis player Martina Navratilova took a world leader in coming out. Navratilova is probably the most successful out sports player in the history of sporting competition.

New women’s dominated sports are starting to get traction as well. For example, Roller Derby is probably Australia’s largest growing sport, with women taking it up around the country. Following in the footsteps of sports such as netball, roller derby is designed not only to be a great sport, but also as a safe space for women. In doing so it is challenging much of the male-domination of sport, putting women at the forefront of the game.

These are all great achievements for women in sport, but we still have a way to go. When you flick on the TV, it is unlikely that you are going to see women playing sport; you get men’s AFL, men’s rugby, or men’s basketball. Women also continue to earn much less than men, with a recent survey showing that just 2% of coverage goes to purely female sports, and only 0.5% of sponsorship.

And then there is the question of sexism in sport and you have to ask yourself ‘is women’s sport overlooked because of the physical disparities between the sexes, or because of something else?’ Perhaps it isn’t that women can’t jump further or run faster than men that’s the problem.

In a recent interview, Katherine Legge, an American IndyCar driver said “there is absolutely no physical barrier to a woman driving the most prestigious vehicle of them all, a Forumula One car” and she believes racing is “the only sport in the world where women can compete with men on an equal footing”. But no woman has ever been given the chance in an F1 competitive car. So if there isn’t a physical barrier, what’s the problem?

It seems the underlying assertion that playing, watching or even writing about sport somehow makes women “less feminine” may be the real crux of the issue and it’s no coincidence that the more traditionally attractive women at the championships, the likes of Maria Sharapova and Ana Ivanovic, get greater media attention.

We’ve made some great progress in women’s sport and London 2012 was a terrific launchpad that was so desperately needed, but it’s obvious that more still needs to be done, so get out there and support women in sport!