Women and Sport conference: day 2

Kate Rowe continues her reports on the Women and Sport conference in Sydney.

The days started with a plenary session entitled Leadership and Sport Governance, presented by Peter Holmes a Court, a wealthy businessman who co-owns a major rugby club. he gave a wonderful talk on strategies of how to get more women on board. I look forward to sharing some of the ideas he put out there. He was followed by Moya Dodds, a past Matilda (Australia's national women's soccer team) and now a lawyer who serves on the board of the Football Federation of Australia. She is the woman to serve as Vice President of the Asian Football Confederation.

In the afternoon, I presented my paper, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and by the way Parity - Lesbians at the Gay Games". About 50 people attended, which was great, since there were many other talks taking place at the same time. About a third of them had attended the Gay Games.

I gave an overview of the history of the Games, using Australia as a case study to show the effort made to increase women's participation and involvement. I presented the history of women on the board of the Federation and the challenges faced in the here and now of recruiting and retaining women on the board. I noted that unlike most of the organisations presented at the conference, the FGG was entirely voluntary, and the investment in time and finance can be a deterrent to recruiting board members, and in particular women.

I spoke of the Federation's Gender Equity policy, adopted at the 2009 Annual Meeting, and the challenge in now implementing this policy. It's not enough to express good intentions, it's essential to push for it to become a reality.

I closed with a Gay Games VIII promotional video, which received a great round of applause.

The presentation was very well received and I had several women make inquiries for follow up contact. In particular, I met five young women from Smith College in Massachusetts, all post graduates with a degree in Sport and Exercise Science who are looking to volunteer...they are our future.

Afterwards I attended two great sessions: one on the issue of intersex people in sport, which is interesting in light of the FGG's Gender Identity Policy. The other was on discrimination against women within the IOC, which denounced the men's club status of the IOC.