Kit concerns causing girls to quit sport

Many point to rising levels of screen time and a lack of access to opportunities to play sport as factors for the fall in exercise among children - but inactivity has become particularly pronounced in girls who are 5% less likely to be active than their male peers. Tess Howard plays hockey for Team GB and has been investigating whether the kit girls are told to wear when playing sport at school is one of the least recognised factors playing a part in lower participation rates. She argues that negative associations with gendered items of clothing such as skorts are a significant part of the problem…

James - It's great to catch up with you Tess. Thanks for chatting with me. It's a shame we couldn't do this in person, but you've got a pretty decent excuse as they go. Tell us where you are right now.

Tess - Thanks. I'm in Buenos Aires getting ready to play in the FIH Pro League, which is a hockey tournament of the top eight teams in the world.

James - How's everything shaping up for the big one, the Olympics, next year?

Tess - Things are going well. We have the Olympic qualifiers in January in Valencia. And then Paris obviously is in July/August time. So all guns blazing to get qualified and then we'll go hopefully to Paris and win another medal.

James - Well, we're all rooting for you. I thought you'd be a good person to talk to this week given that we're addressing levels of physical inactivity among the population. It's so important to get young people in particular in good habits, in good relationships with exercise, and we know that the trends in youth participation in sport are not positive ones, are they?

Tess - It's a problem for all, but specifically young girls experience negative experiences of sport. So my question was, okay, let's take something as mundane as uniform. It's gendered from age five. Does that have an impact on girls' participation in sport? I went into my research and found that it had a huge impact that we needed to address. I found that 70% of women had seen girls drop out of sport because of sports kit and body image concerns. That was extremely alarming for me, and I felt like I was sitting on something that people needed to know. So you have the practicality of the kit - the ergonomics of it, the comfort of it - if you don't have a choice to wear what you feel more comfortable in, you are generally going to have a negative experience of sport. The whole point of sport is to feel free to express yourself. If you can't feel yourself wearing a kit, you're going to associate PE or sport with feeling uncomfortable. Then you have the extra layer of the gender coding of it, and the issue that we have when we separate boys and girls from a very young age, especially in a sports context. It comes from this idea that you have to maintain a traditional femininity. It starts in Victorian public schools: you start off with these incredible images of young girls playing sports in corsets and dresses, you see it move to longer skirts without corsets, then you see it move to pinafores, which are little dresses, and then the evolution moves further to the skort. That was so that, if the wind blows up your skort or, heaven forbid, you roll around on the ground playing hockey, you won't be exposed.

James - And you found from personal experience that the skort was inhibiting your performance as an athlete.

Tess - I always thought of the skort as a metaphor for where women were in sports, because the skort is extremely uncomfortable. The question I would ask is, would you wear a skort to run a marathon in? Would anyone? And the answer would always be no. We've never worn skorts to do fitness tests and we've never worn skorts to train as an elite athlete. When we played, though, before we changed the guidelines this summer, it wasn't even questioned. And the only reason why it wasn't questioned is because it was ingrained in tradition and stepping out of that tradition was worse for you than wearing a pair of shorts.

James - And do you feel that girls feel conflicted about playing sport and being feminine at the same time today? There's still a perceived contradiction there.

Tess - If you ask any girl, or probably any person, what the ideal feminine look is, they'll probably be able to recite exactly what it is because it is so ingrained in us. It happens in pretty much all sports. There are specific barriers to women's kit, whether that's in football wearing white shorts because of period concerns (they've changed to blue shorts now, the Lionesse) or whether it's in gymnastics where they have to glue their leotards to their skin so that it doesn't move because you get deducted points if you are seen to be moving your leotard around. In 2021, Sarah Voss, a German gymnast, wore a full length leotard for the first time in the Tokyo Olympics and it was seen as this massive deal and it's actually the most practical thing to wear because you're not worried about what you're looking like. And, if you think about, at a young age, when girls start going through puberty, their body's change, as boys do, but very obviously for girls when they start to develop breasts and they start to menstruate, you have specific concerns. And if you're putting all of that plus, for your uniform, you might be wearing a T-shirt that is so tight or is cut in such a way that you feel that you are not living up to that standard, and because there's no room in women's experience to have different body types, you have to be a certain way, the pressure that gets built up, it's simply easier to drop out. And that's what we've seen. It's just simply easier to drop out. Then you have the worst part of it, which is that your relationship to sport is defined by how you feel and what you're wearing has a massive impact on how you feel, your self-confidence. Then you see the trends in long-term participation really fall.

James - So in order to reverse this, is it just as simple as we give girls the choice of what to wear? Or is this going to take a long time really before these ingrained cultures start to be reversed?

Tess - Well, in hockey we've managed to change the guidelines, to change the rules internationally. First, we did it domestically to offer choice and then internationally we ran out at the Europeans this summer in a combination of half and half of skorts and shorts, which has never been done before in any team sport, let alone hockey. In one swift move with, if you like, eight pairs of shorts, we redefined what hockey could look like. What I've seen over the last six months since that is a gradual culture shift where clubs are starting to provide women's shorts and, because you can wear them in the leagues now, many women are changing to wearing shorts and messaging me saying, 'thank you so much, I never thought there would be a day that I'd be able to wear shorts.' And you think it's bizarre that the rules said that you couldn't wear them. So it starts, whilst we can talk about choice, it starts with the policy change. It's taken six months really for me to see the change but now I look at my teammates, my GB teammates, and think maybe six of us to start with were quite comfortable wearing shorts for the first time in elite international history and now it's spread in the team. My teammates are coming up to me and saying, 'I don't why I ever wore a skort. We train in shorts every day. It just makes sense to play in shorts!'