Martha Ehrenfeld reports on her sessions at the IOC Women and Sport conference

FGG delegate Martha Ehrenfeld reports on a session at the IOC Women and Sport conference:

Because of a quota, I was listening to woman from Norway and man from Denmark talk about quotas! The panel was on “Government, Legislature and Attitudes” at the IOC conference on Women and Sport.

My involvement with the Federation of Gay Games had been a volunteer in NY and a tennis player in Chicago and Cologne. In Chicago, I was pulled in at the last minute to help run a tennis event by a San Francisco friend. That led me to volunteer to be a representative for Team San Franciso to the FGG Assembly.

Then in 2011, the FGG Cleveland steering committee was seeking a woman, part of their mandate to have female representation, and my name popped up. It would have never occurred to me that I would be a good fit. That is exactly the message of many of the workshops and panels: encouraging women to be more involved in leadership and management. They told us raise your hand, don’t worry if you think you are not qualified (men often do not), take an extra assignment and force yourself to go to the social hours after meetings even if that is not your thing or you have children and elder care demands.

And in fact, quotas or mandated percentage representation do work.

As the London Olympics are coming fast, it is clear the IOC is getting close to their goal to have women and men equally represented in competitions. London has also made a huge effort to have women lead major planning areas: the sports director, for example is a women, something hard to imagine in earlier Olympics. But where the IOC and its associated federations still struggle is in it’s upper level leadership. And at the end of two days of amazing stories of successful women, who came on stage to represent the IOC? Four older men.

There was a strong message that many of the athletes who went on to be involved in sports leadership had great mentors. I too will look to the women of FGG for mentorship. What advice can they offer?

It was exciting to be in such an international conference, much like how I felt at the FGG Assembly in Cologne. The attendees were mostly women but there were men too. Many were on their country’s Olympic Committee, others were representing sports such as USA Softball, UK Badminton or Canadian Swimming. There was also a large Women’s Sports Foundation presence with the celebration of the 40th anniversary of Title 9. I wore my FGG shirt and told anyone who would listen about us and Cleveland 2014. Most knew nothing about FGG except a nice fellow who was the event planner and recognized the logos. Gay Games participants are everywhere!


Read all our coverage of this conference HERE.