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In Thursday’s Melbourne Herald Sun, there was a curious little article heralding what appears to be October 2009 ABS survey stats that suggest that more boys are now playing Australian Football.
Waiting until February 2010 to release the results seems a bit odd. That aside, we’ve had debates last year around Jeff Kennett backing women to play AFL, and we’ve seen Herald Sun columnist Robyn Riley invite debate around the subject “Men’s footy is not for women”.
And at some point, one wonders why all sports seem to have to have a focus on increasing both male and female participation. For Rugby 7s to make the Olympics, they had to illustrate a high level of womens participation (real or imagined?).
But what’s wrong with retaining one or two modern ‘men’s games’.
When a coach attempts to fire up his charges and hollers, “It’s a mans game!!!”, you don’t want Ethan up the back saying: “Well, actually coach, all my sisters are playing it”.
The ABS survey stats were referenced from the 2009 Children’s participation in cultural and leisure activities. This has been run previously in 2000, 2003 and 2006 previously.
The survey allows for up to three sport nominations per respondent for most frequently played organized sports in Australia, outside of school hours, by Australian children aged between 5-14.
Figures 2003, 2006, 2009
Boys
Aust Footy : 13.6%, 13.8%, 16.0% -> +2.4%
Soccer (outdoor) : 22.2%, 19.6%, 19.9% -> -2.3%
Swimming : 15.7%, 16.5%, 17.2% -> +1.5%
Netball : 0.6%, 0.1%, 0.3%
Girls
Aust Footy : 0.7%, 0.9%, 0.9%
Soccer (outdoor) : 4.2%, 6.4%, 6.2% -> +2%
Swimming 17.5%, 18.2%, 19.8% -> +2.3%
Netball 18.1%, 17.3%, 17.0% -> -1.1%
Clearly, there’s a boy/girl hand in glove relationship in many cases, with footy Vs netball. Many of us have grown up with that being pretty well obvious.
Football has overall remained stable at 13.4% to 13.2%, but boys participation has fallen while girls’ has increased.
Australian Footy overall has risen from 7.3% to 8.6%.
All of which raises the question: are boys absolutely happy to be playing the same game as their sisters? And is it actually better that there ARE games that are seen as being gender specific?
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