 walked into the first meeting of this committee, but I'm happy that I heard about the committee that the Parliament is supporting in partnership with Young Women lead, a leadership project that 30 young women from across Scotland are taking part in. Some are at the table today and some are in the public seating at the back. I'm really delighted to welcome gyda'r penlytu yng Nghymru a'r panell ddod yma, rydyn nhw, ar y pryd, am gyfodol. A wnaeth i gweithio'r paneleth yn ibl. Felly, mae'n Sikh, Cymru. Professor David Kirk, Professor Of Education at the University of Strath Clyde. Oes yng Nghymrud fel y gymryd? Seyrwch chi ddim yngylched iddyn nhw'n gwybod. Julie Gordon, who is a tennis coach with the Judy Murray Foundation, Dr Helen Sharpe, who is a school of health and social science at the University of Edinburgh, Danielle Gordon, who is a body positivity blogger at the Chatchi Power project, Mark McGeehey, head of partnerships and sustainability at Youth Scotland and Mandy Jones, who is a body positivity blogger at the Empowered Women project. Welcome, all of you, and you will be taking questions from the young women around the table today. There are quite a few of you, and we are time limited. I'm hoping that this will run until approximately 12.25. Don't feel you have to answer every question, please. If you feel you have something to contribute, please indicate to me and I will bring you into the discussion. There may be issues raised that fall more into the remit of some of you than others. Also, if there is something that you would like to add to the discussion but you don't have to hand, we can organise that later on for submission to the committee here. I'm also delighted to welcome those who may well be watching us online to this extremely exciting and interesting project. Agenda item number one for the committee to decide upon is to take item three in private. That would be consideration of the evidence that we hear today. Are we all agreed? Thank you very much. Agenda item two is the evidence session on women and girls participation in sport. The committee met in January and agreed the topic of inquiry, and that is to look at the issue of access to sport, in particular as it is faced by girls and young women. I thank the panel for the very interesting submissions that they have already made to the committee. I would now like to open up the discussion, and I would like to invite questions from the committee members rather than ask all of you panels to make a presentation. Unless there is something that you are desperately wishing to say before we start, I'll let you have a sentence. You've got them all intimidated already. So we'll move on to questions, and I would like to ask my deputy convener, Beth Cotun, to come to the first question. My first question is about why do you think the proportion of girls meeting physical activity guidelines is lower than boys, particularly when school activity is excluded? Someone would like to respond to that. Well, I'll just pick somebody if you don't mind. Mark, followed by Helen. To be here today, I don't need to press this, no? Can you all hear me? I suppose that one of the things that we've learned at Youth Scotland about girls and young women's participation in community-based activity is that most often it can be it's not necessarily developed to meet their particular needs, it's activities that they might not necessarily want to take part in. What we did through a project called Girls on the Move, which are referred to in the submission, was turn that on its head and provide support through small amounts of funding to help girls identify what they wanted to take part in. Rather than, as that often is the case, where in a previous role I would talk to people and say, well, we need to get girls doing rugby, we need to get girls doing football because there's a governing body target around that or something like that. I actually said, well, have you spoke to girls in the community and do they want to do that or do they want to do something else? One of the things that we found in our recent projects we delivered with Sports Scotland on active girls was if you look at school participation, one of the issues is that in school you know people and you know the people who will be delivering it, the PE teacher or so on, whether it's out in the community, if you have to go to a club where you don't know anyone, whether it's your boy, girl of any age, that creates a barrier, that creates a fear, whereas if you have community club people coming into the school to support the delivery, then all of a sudden you've created a human connection, there's a relationship there with that coach, that young leader, that you can then help facilities to go into the community, but that's not the common way of doing things, so that may be one of the issues from our experience. Helen. Yeah, I think I totally agree, Mark, with lots of the points that you're raising. I think my background is in psychology, so I work in body image and eating disorders and for me it's really interesting developmentally that the time that we see this gender difference emerging is in early adolescence, so 11, 12, 13, we see this big disparity emerging and that is also paralleled with other types of disparities that we see emerging at that time, so for me in particular the interesting one is body dissatisfaction and low body confidence, so we basically see these things happening in parallel and we know that developmentally this is a time when young women are going through quite major physical changes, also quite major psychological changes in terms of identity development and also social comparisons and looking to peers and that these are all sorts of things that I can see feeding to why particular types of activity or engagements and particular types of supports might be might be preferable and that's where actually as Mark says, speaking with young people about what it is that they want to do rather than making an assumption about what they should be doing, it's really important. I have David followed by Mandy. So I think part of the answer to your question Beth is that it's complex and for many years and this is an issue that's been in my field in physical education has been running for maybe 30 years or more at least. I think that the initial and recurrent sort of answer to your question is that the girls are a problem, the girls themselves, it's almost like a blaming the victim situation but I think the research that's been done in that intervening period of time over the last 30 or 40 years particularly by feminist researchers has shown that this is a very complex issue indeed, it's to do with where girls are at this particular stage in their lives, it's to do with treating them with respect, it's to do with taking them seriously, all too often in school physical education they aren't actually taking that seriously and certainly what they feel is important for them isn't considered as part of the curriculum offer. Thanks for the opportunity everyone for having me today. Just a wee discussion we were having before we came in there was that there is a lack of sort of female coaches and female leaders in certain sports and I think that for young women particularly when I was in school if you don't see yourself in a role then you don't see it as being possible and you're probably a bit of lack of engagement so I went on to become a bodybuilder in my early to mid 20s but I hadn't seen a woman do that until my adult years so how would I have known that maybe there was an interest in that sport, I don't know I think that there's a big lack of kind of female instructors and leaders in a lot of areas and whether that's that we need to kind of coach leaders from a younger age or or or something I'm not quite sure. I'm going to bring Nell in because the question that Nell has ties in with this and then perhaps come back to both of you for a response. Nell. Hello my question is why do you think that physical activity declines with age and is there a particular drop-off between secondary and primary and why do you think that is? Julie. Hi there thanks for having me. Just to add to what Danny was saying as well it's like I think there is that lack of role models in sport so when when children's girls are younger in primary school they have female teachers and maybe older girls they see doing sport but the older they get the less role models and leaders that are out there certainly as a female coach I've worked in tennis for over 20 years and I have very few female colleagues and that there's initiative like that Judy Murray's could have pushed through something called she rallies and it's all about getting mums teachers older girls sports leaders training them to deliver so that young girls and teenage girls can have female role models who lead sessions and I think I think there needs to be a commitment to kind of leadership in teenage girls and you know females in their 20s and above and if she's if there's more of a female workforce that's developed then I think you'll see more girls playing sport I think the lack of that is why a lot of girls fall out as they go into kind of high school and beyond. Danielle. There's been proof that the biggest drop-offs are between the ages of about 13 to 15 years old for girls and I think that directly relates to puberty and the self-esteem issues that come along with puberty and the changes in bodies at that age that girls are not necessarily supported enough with. The teaching in school about how natural those changes are and the issues that could come along with it along with breast size periods body hair that might all be subjects for bullying or problems to arise and potentially the addition of being more having a more active online life at those ages interaction with social media the comparison sort of culture that comes along with that if you're not using social media in a positive way. I think those are those are big issues for that age group. I'm going to bring David and Mandy back in but can I ask Bethan Nell if there's anything you would like to probe further from what you've heard? Just briefly just there seem to be a relationship between what you say Mark and what you're saying David about the basically women all young girls not being respected in what they actually want to be doing and why do you think that is why are girls considerations not being put into place? Nell? No that's fine. You're focused on online life and social media. Do you have any specific examples of safer influences that social media have on young women and girls perception of fitness ideals? I don't have research, I'm not an academic but I have anecdotal research and I think the way our culture is at the moment is very screwed up about our ideas of what fitness actually is, what health is and what sporting activity is for. We have kind of lost our idea that sport is good for our physical and our mental health and has many many variations many many benefits on top of just many many benefits on top of just mental and physical sport you know it's just been proof about how you know we can aid people as they grow up with their team skills with their determination with their leadership ability and the way that fitness is is now talked about is all to do with how to change your body shape how to have a particular body shape and it's very apparent like even me just from a personal experience looking at my social media which I would probably say is one of the most curated social media accounts that there is because I have made sure that that is what I'm feeding my brain with every single day rather than any toxic messaging and even even still the algorithm still shows me when I look at my fitness tab on Instagram is thin extremely toned bodies where fitness is not anything to do with physical and mental wellbeing it is about having a certain body type and I think that message that is constantly being pushed to young girls is warping is warping our idea of why we should like the motivations of why we should be having to be undertaking physical activity David so there's three things really now because of the multiple questions but why girls aren't respected I think we need to think about when girls arrive in secondary school physical education and boys these are large classes 30 pupils maybe more of widely varying interest and motivation and ability and teachers are faced with dealing with that on a day-to-day basis period by period through the school day and so and the way that school physical education is set up around what we call the multi activity curriculum short units of work around basketball then soccer then hockey then gymnastics and so on it's a particular structure to school physical education even within the context of curriculum for excellence that works against student-centred pedagogies so that's in the sense that the answer to the first question what I was going to say to add to the mix on this in terms of why girls maybe drop out or drop activity drops down it's a curious thing about the way that community sports organized so in my lifetime my first ever experience of organized teaching in physical activity sport was when I went to high school age 12 but in that period leading up till now we've had an explosion in youth sport provision for young people and we now find kids as young as four or five involved with all sorts of different sports in the community and it seems as if anybody is allowed to play until they get to the age of about 12 or 13 then all of a sudden it becomes very very exclusive I know this firsthand because I was a rugby coach in youth teams for many years with my sons and all of a sudden you may be desperate to play you turn up to every training session but you're not allowed to play because the teams got to win and you're not good enough so we actually have a policy an unwritten policy in the way that community-based sport operates you can be as keen as mustard to play and it works between the ages of 13 and 16 or 17 and then it stops again this is a remarkable thing and you can be the biggest duffer there is and be offered a game because they're short of numbers so my eldest son who I coached all the way through his youth set up in rugby is now 28 and plays for the probably the worst team on the earth and anybody can play again so there's something structural around the way we do youth sport that I think is an issue along with all of the other issues that we've been mentioned final thing about social media there's been a fantastic very innovative project carried out by a young researcher called Dr Victoria Goodyear at Birmingham University where she's studied young people's use of social media to access information about health and wellbeing and it's come up with some very very fascinating and scary results. Mandy could you sort of wrap up this part of the session for us? Yes I've sort of been eagerly nodding along to a lot of those points there I've got so much that I want to add and again I'm not an academic so I come from a purely sort of anecdotal social media type of research however interestingly a lot of my audience online is now that sort of 15 16 17 age groups I've got a few things that I'd like to add so first of all with regards to the drop out in that sort of age group between like 13 to 15 and 16 a lot of the things that came up in the research that sort of the stuff that I received was that mixed classes are troubling as their bodies change and to echo what Danny was saying I just don't think there's enough sort of preparation for how the body's going to change or how that ties into their kind of fitting in with physical activity but I'd also like to add that on social media I feel like again like Danny was saying there's this lack of engagement with fitness and for what it really offers other than the physical aesthetic kind of thing that comes with it this cartoon like image we're being fed and recently we actually received a letter from a girl who's 16 and she just wanted to write anonymously to us about her own body image struggles and there were so many things in there a lot of what she'd been fed was from social media she wanted to replicate some of the celebrity imagery that she saw online she says she wears a waist trainer to school to try and bring her waist in she can't wait till she's of an age where she can have her body operated on and she can have cosmetic surgery so actually what fitness is and how that sort of aesthetic being a byproduct of fitness is something that's overlooked completely I hope that that makes a bit of sense thank you thank you I'm going to move on now to Diane and Katie Diane I've got a question which I think leads on quite nicely from what David was saying why do you think that male adherence to physical activity is highest among 16 to 24 year olds but for women it's highest among 35 to 44 year olds I'm thinking perhaps I'll bring in Katie as well because I think both of your topics you wanted to cover relate very much to what David was saying so my question is really around female participation in sports clubs I think you're touching that there's a bit of elitism maybe in sports clubs and especially across different ages and as we get towards a more affiliated sports club with actual sporting bodies there's a real drop for women's participation so I'm just wondering what you thought about that yeah so two things David if you could address them I'll try and juggle them on them no no no you're right so I think that the first question I think that the the issue about age stage is very very important you know if you think about the transition from primary to secondary school for a start and you've all been through that moving from a small quite intimate sort of setting usually into a much scarier you know big school and young people who have an ongoing involvement in community based sport that transition may be easier for them in terms of their physical activity but then as I say you come up against this and it might not be in every sport mark will have much better insight to this than me I'm speaking very much from my personal experience but certainly you get to some sports where it's excluded you know and then if you think about the transition from school to work school to university and you think about the transition into early adulthood maybe into steady relationship marriage or some partnership and so there's all sorts of crucial stages that disrupt your ability to remain physically active and I'm not sure how well physical education at school for example prepares young people for those adaptations that they need to make in certainly young adulthood. I think that Mandy's comment when we were chatting earlier about not being aware of the range of possibilities is another thing that we find with kids you know they know about hockey they know about netball they know about swimming but they don't know about spin they don't know about boxer size and it's only when those possibilities are opened up to them that then the range becomes much much clearer. I don't know if does that also tie in your question as well does that give you some yeah yeah I think really the is why the participation is so much less for girls and it is for boys and I think maybe some of those issues that you're talking about tend to affect women a lot more. There are issues around masculinities and femininities as well and girls are often sent the message that it's not girly girls can't play sport and this is actually a very real issue in some communities and again we need to be quite contextualised about this. My colleague Kim Oliver who works in Las Cruces, New Mexico tells horrendous stories about Hispanic American girls who didn't be sporty because it puts them at serious risk of violence in their cultures. That's an extreme example but we can think of maybe similar sorts of situations in Scotland and in the UK where that is an important issue. I'm going to move on to Mark and then Danielle but I would be interested in Julie's experience about the 16 to 24 year old males where it's older women that tend to come back to sport and your view on that. I think in terms of the kind of 16 to 24 age group I think that where we've had success there it's maybe when it comes from my experiences of being a tennis coach is when you've kept girls together in groups throughout the teenage years. I agree with David about the kind of youth sport environment where actually you get to a certain age if you're not good enough to compete in the competitive structure you kind of send the message that this sport's not for you anymore so I do think that we need more recreational opportunities for girls and boys in their teenage years and I think also that you need to have a social aspect to it as well and to sell that you know whether it's you know come and play and we have a pizza at the end or you know bring a friend or they can do the scores even if they can't play something like that. I think it needs to be kind of more than just about the sport you know to keep people engaged. In terms of women coming back into it you know it's maybe like you know in terms of having children and kind of life transitions they might re-engage through their children so I've seen that a lot kind of anecdotally that you know mothers and fathers bring their children to take part in tennis and then they want to get involved themselves and I think engaging parents and with their children is a key way of re-engaging maybe particularly mothers and certainly there's quite a lot of push on kind of parent and child sessions in the kind of tennis world you know we kind of believe in that and it gets you know parents you know exercising with their children. There's another thing a junior park run I don't know if you're aware of it but again one of the beauties of that is it re-engages adults in running. I think there's some park run fans there but that is for 4 to 14 year olds but parents end up taking part with the children so it's a very clever way of re-engaging adults in physical activity and it's very kind of inclusive so any level can do it. Mark the evidence is quite clear about sports clubs and participation if you could press that. I was actually going to say something along those lines there. I suppose one of the issues in terms of sport is only successful in Scotland and a community level because of the volunteers that deliver it. If you remove the volunteers involved in sport then we wouldn't have a sporting infrastructure but if you look at the majority of those volunteers their entry into sport has been a very positive one they've went through they might have had a competitive aspect to it they've developed and I say that having found a sport that wasn't a traditional one I ended up doing martial arts and I ended up having a little bit of success in it but then those are the people who end up leading and who end up delivering and volunteering and they need to be celebrated because they're giving up their time and that's brilliant but they won't necessarily have had the experience of that sort of person-centred approach and you know they love sport and so you've come along so therefore you will like sport as well whether is what we talk about in youth work is that youth work approach is that person-centred that relationship you get alongside someone so actually the sport is the tool for the engagement and that's a very different approach and a very different way of delivering sport. So one of the examples I would like to give is I was involved in an initiative in the East End of Glasgow looking at a Commonwealth Games legacy project and that was working with communities in the East End which had identified that there were opportunities for young people to do competitive sport that sort of sports development pathway or taste or come and try and that's our youth work setting but there was very few opportunities for that on-going regular recreational involvement whereby if you were rubbish you could still come along and have fun with your friends that didn't exist and I don't think that's unique to that area of Glasgow I think that's probably something that people will experience all across the country. The difficulty is that that infrastructure around the volunteers knowledge bringing it back to that if you want to involve young people who aren't necessarily sporty then you have to make it you have to break down the steps you have to get alongside them and start from where they are so that's what we mean by a youth work approach. We're involved in some work within new projects and deliver in two sites in north and west Glasgow which is talking about sport for change where sport is just the tool to engage people from disadvantaged backgrounds and there's commonalities whether that's girls involvement or ethnic minorities or other people who have experienced disadvantage so it's very complex because sport won't exist without the volunteers but those volunteers won't necessarily have the skills to engage people that aren't traditionally sporty so how do we how do we bring these two things together? I just wanted to reflect on the fact that women tend to come back into sport in their mid-30s and there's so many stories that I had from women saying I'm only getting back into it now after such a harrowing experience at school it was put off so badly because of an issue of getting my period one time and it being so embarrassing or the uniforms were just horrendous and I was put off sport completely or I was always being told that I was a boy or that I was gay which was such a negative you know when you know I'm 36 now so it would be my age and then I know what they what they're talking about and I think that women tend to come back into sport at an older age because there's a community feel that might encourage them because there's different motivations behind why they want to get back into sport there's an idea around fitness but there's but then you also have to remember about the ideas around diet culture and pressures on women to have a specific body type as the age so not all motivations are are the best motivations I think is it pressing Dave? One very quick point just to add as well that there is in the research is a social gradient in participation amongst older people and amongst women and it's certainly the case all of the evidence shows that older women in the 30s 40s and older who don't who are in living in poverty living in multiple deprivation do not come back into sport have never been in sport and have no opportunities to do so and one of the things that concerns me about a lot of our initiatives is that they're not very well targeted they're very general where I think they really need to go where the need is and the need would certainly be for older people older adults would be in those multiply deprived parts of Scotland. I think the next theme of questions that we have ties in very well with with what we've already had so can I ask Jenny and Lauren particular interests in this to start us off in that section Jenny? Hi we've kind of touched on this briefly already in regards to social media but could we explore maybe a bit further the role of body image as a barrier to participation in particular the factors that are unique to young girls and what can be done to change that culture? Lauren, I think you can add to that from the panel. Hello so again this question's been touched on slightly before but we're looking for examples of how negative experiences of PE at school among girls can act as a barrier to participation. Helen? Yeah I can maybe pick up on the social media point so I'm coming from a kind of slightly different background as an academic but there is a large body of research now looking at different types of images on social media so kind of about sort of five years ago everybody was interested in looking at things both inspiration so kind of images that glorify thinness and that kind of tied in with the current physical kind of ideal for women of thinness and there's a extremely large body of research evidence so looking at those types of images is really detrimental to young women's body image. Then kind of a couple of years ago we had a bit of a shift culturally and it's reflected in what we've talked about so far where we moved more to a kind of fit ideal so here the ideal is rather than just a focus on thinness it's a focus on leanness and there was a kind of thought within the body image and eating disorders community that maybe this might be a more could be a more positive ideal. What we've actually seen is that really we've just replaced one unhelpful ideal with another and the small body of research evidence that's been put together to date around fitspose a kind of fitspiration imagery is that it has exactly the same negative impact as we saw with the thinspose imagery you see that people who are exposed to that kind of imagery do have higher intentions to exercise but those are never translated into actual activity levels and they're associated with increases in body dissatisfaction and body shame and more kind of body surveillance so really it actually although it looks like it might be promising and might promote engagement with activity and sport it really it really doesn't and kind of builds an ongoing ideal of a kind of unattainable physique which is just a kind of a barrier for young people like seeing so I just thought I'd kind of add that that actually the the research evidence really aligns well with people's anecdotal experience on on social media. Chris your question was of particular interest on that theme if you'd like to add it into the mix before I go to to others so I kind of snuck the question in earlier but now that it's back to social media I think that what I want to ask is why do you think that as this change happened from thinspiration to fitspiration as you've defined it they still remain that kind of same kind of controlling mechanism why do you think that this kind of continues to occur regardless of the change in direction? Do you like to come back on that Helen before I move to David and Mandy? Yeah I can do so I think I mean an interesting area that we haven't really touched on at all but is relevant here is that both both thinspiration and fitspiration really are buying into a much broader kind of issue around weight bias and fatphobia so they both perpetuate a kind of a message around weight that being at a higher weight status is a kind of morally bad state that you've put yourself in it and that actually your weight is something that should be under your individual physical control and the large body of research evidence shows that that's that's not the case and the social and the kind of wider determinants of health are incredibly important from that but the implication of that kind of weight bias that is incredibly prevalent in society is that we should all be working on ourselves physically and so whether that gets expressed through working on ourselves by restriction so dietary restriction or expressed by working on ourselves through exercise it's really the same same message that's coming through so I think that that is why they have the same underlying kind of negative impact Chris you want to come back on that I suppose to follow on from that one of the things that we discovered while researching this was way back when we were originally starting this was that in relation to say for example fatphobia and weight control eating disorders as an issue as an illness was very high I think it was 1.25 million people were suffering from it and yet the funding was incredibly low in response to that do you feel that this moralistic idea that this should be in your control kind of feeds into that kind of aspect of the reason why society in general doesn't maybe consider treating this as seriously as it should be thank you Chris would you like to address that Helen then we'll move on yeah so as I've understood the question that it's around why eating disorders don't get the recognition that we would anticipate based on first we'll have serious they are and also how common they are yeah I think it is that the idea that you should have your own individual control over your body and that it's a kind of moral decision for you about what you do and don't eat is really important in that aspect I mean the other really interesting thing in the context of weight bias in eating disorders is actually when we think of eating disorders we typically think of severe and enduring anorexia whereas actually the most common eating disorders are eating disorders associated with loss of control over eating like binge eating which tend to be experienced by people who are at a higher weight so even there we can see that actually that group are kind of overlooked as having experienced a very serious difficulty that they need mental health support with and it's viewed you know often by people as just an inability to have self-control David body images the barrier body image and ended the issue of young girls experiences in physical education and so very briefly body shape anxiety as we understand it is so widespread in society and has been for quite some time I can just make one comment and we were talking about this earlier before we came in and it's the repeated use of body mass index as a measure of obesity obesity scientists have a huge responsibility to bear here as do gps and so this is so widely used at such a crude measure it mostly with the Scottish men's rugby team who will play tomorrow against France most of those people would be classified as obese clinically obese according to BMI so the white produce of this does not help at all and we really need to have some critical scrutiny of how it's used and what it means there's conceptual confusion around weight and obesity these are different things and so that's just to say that and it doesn't help with the body shape anxiety issue in school physical education one of the things we found from the project we did in Glasgow schools that we provided written evidence on the girls said this all the time they were just terrified of being judged and that was the language they used being judged in by other girls because we were working with all girls classes the stories they told us about boys were just some of them were just horrendous I mean really would verge on abuse but being judged and being so self-conscious so there's something about school physical education about being in specific kind of uniform or kit your body being exposed as you're learning new movements the potential for humiliation and therefore the need for a particular kind of pedagogy in physical education classes that helps girls to feel comfortable to trust each other so they talked a lot about trust they learning to work together with with other girls who are not your friends girls who you don't know very well that never gets worked on in school physical education and being being taken seriously I mentioned this before actually being asked for your opinions on things sharing information about what you think your needs are what your interests are so these are some of the reasons why girls find school physical education difficult even the fact that they are incredibly intimidated some girls by other girls who are the sporty girls and the loud girls and the girls who attract the teacher's attention all the time thank you I'm going to go to Mandy and Danielle because of their direct experience that they have with us but I think the question that Sheikah was talking about earlier it's very relevant here if you could feed that in before Mandy and Danielle address it I think you've touched up on Kirkham for excellence earlier and I just wondered what can be done to improve a girls experience of PE in general like within the context of education itself thank you there's a few things I'd like to add just on what we were talking about there and then I'm going to go on to your question there so it was interesting what Helen was saying about the shift from thin aspiration to fit aspiration look itself social media provides direct access to brands for brands to certain celebrities and influencers Kim Kardashian for example has 80 million followers that is 80 million impressionable sets of eyes who watch everything she does who want to look the way she does there's no getting away from that fact and most of those will be between a certain age group we've also got this surge something that cropped up a lot we've got this surge in reality TV programmes which serve us a new beauty ideal which is that sort of cartoon like figure and it's no coincidence I don't think that I read an article in The Guardian the other day that hospital admissions for eating disorders are at an all-time high and like Helen was saying they're eating disorders don't always show visually so it might be that we're not kind of accounting for everything there and another barrier to body for body image is that they don't like okay so don't like being forced to wear a uniform came up a lot so that is you know something that they they all have to wear maybe they have feel they have shorter legs or they don't like just different things you're going through so much change at that time and it can be very difficult and what was your question again I went off on a social media Kardashian tangent no I think there was relation to what David was saying earlier wave crooked for excellence but to be exact my question was what can be done to improve a girl's experience of PE itself I think there are just yeah a few different things cropped up so a lot of girls said that they didn't like being in mixed classes because again that allows for that sort of harassment and you know gering and whatever from the boys and a lot of girls in like wearing uniform and again just a lack of awareness of how their bodies are going to change and how that's going to affect their confidence and self-esteem as they change as their bodies change periods as well and yeah there's a lot in there. Danielle? A few things I've written down in regards to the inspiration, fitspiration, weight bias I feel like that's also tied in with international beauty standards or standardised beauty standards that are constantly are constantly been moved further and further out of everybody's reach and that's that's tied to capitalism that's tied to brands that's tied to advertising media so it's it's just that I feel like that will potentially never never end there will be another thing and another thing and another thing that will keep on going until I say until but I don't know when there's an end to it but it'll just keep developing until you know we abolish capitalism. That's a bit beyond the reach of this committee. Come on Linda. In regards to girls specifically and their barriers in sport I've written down the changes that happen with puberty and in specifics breasts size, breast growth or comparisons of breast sizes. The idea that parents have no clue that they should be providing supportive clothing for their children. The bullying and the sort of ribbing that comes with these extremely natural changes in bodies and that's to do with body hair as well and with periods and for it you know I'm of a of a certain generation where there was so much shame and lack of conversation in schools around periods around like it was you know you know girls were still taught about periods separate from the boys and I know that's probably very different now in schools and I hope it is but there's still so much shame wrapped up in the things that girls experience as they go through puberty that can cause them to tease other girls or be teased by boys or be sexualised by boys and I've had actually quite upsetting evidence of being sexualised by older men and teachers which have come to me and which I have submitted anonymously but it's also another aspect that affects young girls that might not affect other genders. Helen and then David please. Just very briefly to follow up on Danny's point there was a study over in Australia looking specifically at the question of breast development as a barrier to engaging in PE and I think they were quite surprised to find that it was a rate of 40% of girls in secondary school rated breast development as a specific barrier to them and that the issues that they were raising were around concerns about breast movement during physical activity pain from breast movement during physical activity and not having the right not knowing what type of sports bra they should be wearing and how to access it. So yeah just again to back it up that that is definitely something that we know from research is a barrier. Right before I bring David in Jenny. I think you spoke briefly about it there Daniel but I was just wondering in regards to body image looking a bit closer at fashion the kind of unique fashion trends for young women and how that could potentially be a barrier to their participation in sport. I think we'll stick with Daniel in that one David and then come back to you. I've spoken to a few PE teachers actually over the last couple of weeks to discuss this because my experience of sport when I was at school was I went to a private school in Glasgow and we had a very strict uniform and it was the most off-putting thing ever because of very small skimpy shorts feeling very uncomfortable feeling very insecure and not having any variation in that something that a few points around that is some schools when they don't have a uniform a sporting uniform and you're allowed to there's been positives because you're allowed to choose what you wear and you get more opportunity to to decide and cover up or or not cover up however you want to which is great and that but on the flip side of that it's potentially causing more problems because there's pressure on people to have certain clothing certain brands certain styles which they might not have access to they could be bullying involved with that and then when there is a school uniform or sporting uniform that is brought in a negative and a positive on that on that aspect is it can be really restrictive and no two girls are the same so there's always going to be a comparison that is provided when you're in a standardised uniform and it might not just might not be suitable for the person or the sporting activity and but I have spoken to someone from a school in Edinburgh who says that they're which was a delight for me to hear because they are a private school but they have a standardised school uniform sporting uniform and but it's really varied so they have many many different options from cycling shorts to shorts to short shorts to skirts to a skirt which I didn't even know what that was but it's a skirt with shorts attached to it to hoodies to joggers to and I was like that's amazing to hear because you know it was like that when I was at school there was no option and that was definitely off-putting for a lot of people so yeah so there seems to be like issues when there is a uniform when there's not a uniform but yeah fashioned I suppose this play a massive part if you if you don't have a uniform that you have to adhere to right I'm going to ask Anna to add to the discussion about barriers to sport and then go to David and perhaps Helen again Anna yes thank you so much for all the evidence that you've been given already I'm wondering how these barriers that we've discussed so far might affect participation in sports in adult life and do you think to to which extent do they still pose a problem David I'm going to respond to Sheikah's question specifically first of all and then maybe add something on Anna's question so curriculum for excellence when you talk to teachers in schools that they sometimes grumble about curriculum for excellence because it forces them to do certain things but actually it's a very very robust conceptual framework that gives individual schools lots of freedom to do things that best suit the pupils who attend that school and I don't think physical education teachers always take advantage of that fact or perhaps they're even aware of it so that's the first thing to say is curriculum for excellence is not a problem for innovating in school physical education I think that in terms of how we improve physical education my work with teachers suggests to me that many female teachers in particular are very aware that what they offer girls isn't meeting their needs some teachers will say to you we don't have a problem in our school and I probe and say well what do you mean and they say what our girls the Americans would say the girls turn up and turn out they turn up they come to class and they turn out they wear their kit and they appear to be engaged but we have a concept in physical education research where we talk about competent bystanders these are kids who look as if they're busy and engaged they're always in the line to do something and when the teacher looks around again they never see them do it they actually are back in the line again and they think oh well yeah they must be participating what we really need are not one-off projects that have got a limited lifespan however clever they might be however innovative they might be what we need is to mainstream pedagogies that work for girls best example I can give you is the the stuff we provided in the written evidence based on the activist work it's targeted specifically though for girls who are largely living in multiple deprivation um whether this would work for boys people keep asking us what about the boys and we say oh well yeah the boys are doing okay but yes it maybe it could work for them as well what about the kids in the affluent schools well maybe it could work for them too but the need for us we see it primarily in those areas of multiple deprivation the main reason why the one thing we do know from research it's not that physical activity participation in youth predicts participation in adulthood it's physical inactivity that predicts activity in adulthood if you think about the consequences of that or the implications of that idea if if young people are inactive in their youth there's a very high possibility they will be inactive adults as well that's why it's so important that school physical education works because it's it's available to all children and it's free at the point of delivery yeah we've moved on to the wider societal issues there which is good because i know that reagan and katie want to both probe that reagan to what extent do traditional gender roles act as a barrier to sports participation and physical activity in among young women katie i think both questions tie in based off that there are a lot of damaging ideas katie start again you're my didn't come on just based on that there are a lot of damaging ideals around what it means to be a woman and feminine characteristics and how do you think that that impact sport and what can we do to rectify that Helen gosh big topic yeah i might i might leave the how can we rectify a bit now um so i think one thing that's uh one kind of theoretical model that might be helpful to talk about at this point is a theory called objectification theory so basically the idea there is that women's bodies historically have been presented as being passive and as being objects to be looked at to be worked upon um and one of the interesting things in the context of sport is that when um women um internalise these gender ideals so this is a kind of objectified gender ideal it what they tend to do is do a process of self-surveillance so basically watching and looking and checking for them you know at themselves and that we know that that process is extremely strongly linked with experience of shame around the body um and then also with body dissatisfaction and all the things we've talked about flow from that so i think one of the interesting things about that theory is that it might help us to think a bit about what sorts of sports environments might be and exercise environments might be helpful and what sorts of environments might be more difficult so we know environments like for example a kind of traditional german environment um are actually environments where those sorts of experiences so that self-surveillance are much more common um and there are other types of environments which don't bring about those those sorts of experiences um so that aspect of gender roles it's just kind of one element i think is very very relevant here in the context i thinking about when people engage in sport daniel um one of the points that i made my evidence is is based on um well i didn't know about objectification theory like the wording around it but um you know the idea that women are supposed to be small they're supposed to be cute presentable attractive feminine and then sport is considered to be masculine or butch um those are those have from what people have messaged me about have had a massive impact on people's interactions um the idea of have of being of the self-surveillance um i spoke to one teacher who took a very active role in discussing what her students needed and what they would prefer and they found that um during swimming swimming was one of the most difficult because you are so exposed um and she said there was a huge huge drop-off um you know of people participating in swimming in swimming classes and so she said well what can we do and it was actually because there was a lot of being outside of the pool and waiting for your turn to be in the pool and they said we would rather the idea that they are being watched or that even if they're not being watched they think they might be being watched um and and the fear that comes along with that so what she what she implemented was actually everyone being in the pool at the same time so doing synchronised swimming doing water polo and doing lifesaving activities so just to help them feel like they weren't exposed more than they needed to be um which you know is a nice serve i feel that's a nice plaster over the the underlying issue of of these girls having such self-confidence issues um so but just having that dialogue which i know that um david has advocates for is having that conversation with the students constantly of what can we do to make it better i think is so important katie you want to come back in before i go to david mark and mandy and reagan new too if you wish katie um i actually had a question specifically for julie um tennis is often held up is quite a good example of there's a lot of good female role models but this idea of femininity is something which serena williams is one of the biggest female role models is often dragged down for do you see an impact in that in young girls that you coach can you can you repeat that slowly just about serena yeah um the that serena williams is often um said that her body is masculine um her female characteristics are often um essentially stripped from her um i just wondered the impact that had on any young girls who had an interest in the sport and could see a female role model who was being mass you know masculinised um yeah i think uh listen to this might sound a bit strange but the boys tend to be more engaged with the high profile role model tennis players and most girls that i'm involved with they're not that interested in in in that level they don't really watch it on television they're more interested in what they're doing whereas the boys come and tell you everything about what's going on at the top of the men's game so at you know at the level that i work at i don't really see that to be honest um in terms of like role models it's interesting what Naomi Osaka said last week she she won the Australian Open she also won the US Open and she just kind of sacked her coach her parted company and she she basically said that she just wanted to be surrounded by people that made her happy and um i think i think a lot of people of a lot of female coaches have picked up on that message and and and using it to reinforce that when you work with girls in sport that they really want to know that you care about them before they before that they care what you know that that kind of that idea so i think um i think i've linked to a previous point that i made that i think girls need role models closer to home and i think a lot of the lot of the conversation today has been about barriers and things but um there's a lot of good stuff going on as well and i was going to um you would probably know about as well mark but um the the Judy Murray foundation works in partnership with an organisation called peak in the east end of Glasgow and they rolled out a project last year um called like a lassie which was kind of a play on you know the kind of like a girl campaign that you throw like a girl and it's called it like a lassie and it was tennis specific and they worked with schools um with local young people volunteers um it was made it was all female led and they went and delivered taster sessions in primary schools but also followed in followed on with sessions of the community and i think in terms of good practice and what what schools could do better is linking with the community and the clubs and community linking with schools so that if you do take part in a sport in school that you know where you could do it outside of school um and uh and certainly in terms of i've worked in a drum chapel high school for example which is in quite an area of um of Glasgow that is it has got lots of issues with multiple deprivation and uh the PE teacher there at the time was a kind of inspirational young female role model she was head of PE and the girls in her school wanted to be PE teachers you know that that's how and i think just to come back to that role model thing i think is especially for girls it seems to me that they need to be closer to home you know whether it's your mum or your sister or your teacher or they don't have to be amazing they just have to be engaged you know um now i know that sfea's got a particular interest in role models but i'm going to park that a wee bit because i would like to probe further about the feminine characteristics and traditional gender roles do you want to add anything reagan before i want back to our panel um it's just it's for like danielle like you've seen how it's swimming like i have lots of like girlfriend that are bigger and they don't feel comfortable swimming like because they also like where are bikini but they can it's like any common between like that and body positivity um just like to tackle body confidence issues across schools i feel like it needs to be implemented into the curriculum that this that that body confidence um body image understanding about fatphobia um understanding about and tackling um body shaming within schools is should be far higher on the agenda because um you know we tackle racism and we tackle hate speech of other types based on religious beliefs um but body shaming fat shaming is not held to the same level as um as other types of hate speech and i would consider you know an attack on someone's physical appearance is an attack on their person and it should be you know treated in the same way unfortunately it's not seen like that in schools but um i think it should be um i think a bit of a better awareness in schools and that's something that needs to be pushed into the culture of the school from top down it needs to be you know i think that the teachers need to be educated they live in our culture as well and they are affected by fatphobia and diet culture and all of this is just as as young girls are and so i think the education doesn't just need to be for young girls it needs to be for throughout the school um and and also to the parents if possible because you can do the best will in the world you can uh overhaul a school but they'll go home and potentially the message just gets hammered home um one thing no no that's all right just as long as you're quick i'm just aware that as always happens i'm looking at the clock and thinking oh gosh where's the time going um can i just make a really i want to make a really quick point and um you are very well aware of like i'm really into role models and i know that's coming up next but this idea that like young girls are not putting themselves and visualising themselves being high level whereas boys are that's quite terrifying for me and i think that's connected to when women put themselves out there and it's happened in politics as well they get torn down and it's generally to do with their body or their clothing or and i think that automatically makes girls very nervous of putting themselves uh or are reaching for higher levels than uh you know the boys might quick comment from Anna and then fairly quick round-ups on this subject from David Martin Mandy a bit of a more complex question but uh i was just very curious after what Helen said about the thin ideal changing into this very warped fit ideal um and from my personal experience of you i used to be on a competitive athletics team but i never particularly enjoyed the competitive aspect about sports and i always think it's probably different factors for everyone so i enjoy being in nature when i exercise or i enjoy the fun aspect of sports and for the bloggers like is there any kind of way that we can promote this more fun characteristic of sports on social media and is and for the the academics is there any like striving in the curriculum to to emphasise more the fun and and collaborative aspects of sports okay less than a minute each David well so there's been a fair amount of things said that have been i could be construed as is negative and i think that i'm picking up on what Julie said just a moment ago i think there's an awful lot of positives that you need to think about as well um you may not know this but for the first 80 years of physical education in in the UK from the 1880s until the 1940s 50s women were the leaders of the field there's a wonderful historical book called women first um so it's very very important not to lose sight of the fact that progress has been made and women particularly women who are in relatively affluent positions in society the opportunities to play sports now that were never available when i was younger so you can think of a whole range of them. Scottish international rugby team for example for women could never have been imagined before so i think this is very very important i think the issue for me is that people who live in less affluent backgrounds are much less likely to have benefited from that progress and i think this is a very very important consideration and just finally just to emphasise the point Julie made um the demographic of who the teachers and leaders are is so important all of the research shows that physical education in most countries in the global north the united states canada the UK and so on are white middle class and able bodied and where we have a growing um diverse population those teachers don't necessarily speak to the children they're teaching i know this is actually a Scottish government um priority so i'll finish on that thank you David very quickly please mark okay i had a lot to say i'll try and be very succinct about i suppose one of the things and it's an issue that affects all young people but is a particular relevance in this context for girls and young women involvement in sport is the concept of sort of global self-esteem how you feel about yourself in general not just in the context of sport um what we know from the evaluation of girls in the move that where girls and young women had gone through that leadership skills course and had the opportunity and were supported to use that those skills um they are saying some global self-worth and self-esteem was significantly and statistically significantly greater than those that weren't so they they felt more confident based on their experience of of being involved and that then had a positive by-product effect on the other girls and young women in the communities that were getting to see them in those roles but what what the evaluation showed was it wasn't the sport that did it it was the development of the leadership skills it was the development of their sense of self that the sport was the tool by which that was allowed to happen so there's something about as a broader societal thing and obviously been involved in youth work for all young people to develop the sense of self-worth and without having any academic backing up for it but the issues around body confidence and body image if you have a greater sense of self and belief in who you are then some of these issues may not be as you may not be as vulnerable to some of them so I'll finish there. Thank you. Mandy does it have to be competitive? Why can't it just be fun? Well I'll be very very very quick. I firstly want to answer something to Reagan very quickly. Gender roles being like a kind of barrier to I think that was your question to sport is something that came from some of the messages that I received was open plan changing rooms can be a problem because while we're going through a phase of getting to know our bodies male female other genders you're like sort of learning about your body as it develops and and yeah there's a lot of issues there so that was a barrier for gender roles that I just wanted to put out there. In terms of competing and things like that well so it wasn't until I was 25 that I went to a bodybuilding competition and was like oh my god she looks like a superhero I want to do that but I hadn't seen that image of a woman looking like that until I was that age so I think it's just more about taking the fun aspect of sports that children aren't exposed to as much or adolescents aren't exposed to as much into community settings so I did something very briefly last year where I went to certain high schools within the sort of Dundee and wider area and I just took like I went kind of my glamorous self and I just started doing lifting workshops with the girls and actually seen someone like me doing that they were like suddenly lifting or power lifting that's quite cool and it's just about bringing these ideas to a level but something that came up earlier which I think is really interesting just very quickly is that you needn't have to be sort of if I had had exposure to sports when I was younger where I wasn't having to do the thing so I could be the score taker or I could still participate without being the best at it that would have been a huge thing for me sorry over now. Sphere has been very very patient and she wants to talk about role models go for it Sphere. I think we always already have kind of touched upon this my question is how important do you think are for your male role models and increasing participation and I think one example I just thought of is we don't really have them as much like even really successful like female football players no one really knows about it because it's just the men that we focus on in leagues and stuff how important do you think that is for increasing participation. Julie I just taken a pick up on that earlier point I don't think that girls I think they do aspire to high level if you know what I mean but not necessarily via the mechanism of a top role model in the way that boys do and I think but I think it is really important like thinking about something like someone like Laura Muir at the moment you know and but she's getting a lot of media coverage so I think that the media is a big part of that as well and it's like women's football I think is getting better I was thinking about women's football today because I thought I've started noticing it a lot more which means that it's definitely you know it's out there so I think it's really important but I do think these layers of role modelling particularly for females and I think that's because of a lack of confidence so I think you can't generalise for all girls but I think it's the confidence issue that a bit what you're saying there like you know even just to take part as an observer or a helper or a volunteer you can see it which means that you can think well I could maybe give that a try and that applies to adult women as well you know I'm trying to engage people to take part in a really race that's coming up for charity and really I just there's no way I can do that and it's a big it's a big journey and if they see people like them doing it they're more likely to do it themselves and I think it's the media thing for the top female athletes and getting to know them a little bit more and more of their human side because I think that's what girls are interested in they want to they don't need to look superhuman in fact they want to find out what the human things are about their about these sporting role models if I could quickly mention this I think called fitter fitter woman it's FITR woman and it's a brilliant app that's been developed by an athlete academic who's based I think at St Mary's University of London and it's all you basically chart your period on it but it's very specifically for athletes or people that do sport so it tells you what to eat what to what kind of training to do and it's very easy to use it's not like an elite thing either but I thought it's just kind of free as an app and I totally recommend it for anyone that does sport and wants to kind of chart those things at the same time very quick comments from Helen and then Daniel super quick so in terms of role models I think one of the things that we haven't spoken much about is actually peers so not necessarily kind of vertical role models but we know that friends dropping out of sport is a big predictor of individual dropping out of sport so what you see is like cluster of girls falling out together and friendship groups falling out together so we're actually having kind of role models within a peer group of people who are continuing to engage in sport and exercise is really important and then just going back to Anna's point about reasons for exercise which we didn't kind of explore that much so we do know that people have different reasons for engaging with exercise and sport and we know that if people engage in exercise specifically for the reason of changing their physical appearance that they're not likely to get the same benefits from engaging in exercise and sport so basically they don't get the same mental health boost as taking part and they're also less likely to stick around so they come for a bit and they leave so actually thinking about the reasons why people are exercising is really really important Danielle, a quick final comment to wrap up for us please. I was on the subject of role models. The Strathclyde sirens have done, well, Netball Scotland have done a lot of work on role models and how beneficial that they can be and they actually have an initiative in place to bring role models into schools and their focus is on making sure that those role models are as diverse as possible to try and encourage all young girls. That was a really lovely positive note to finish on so thank you for that and can I say to the panel that if there is anything that comes to mind and I'm sure it will please drop us a line because we'd be very interested in having that. I'm now going to pass to my deputy convener, Beth Clouton, to wrap up the session. I'm sure that everyone agrees that that was amazing and there's so much for us to think about and I feel like the theme which keeps emerging is this idea like a societal pressure for girls to fit from institutions for girls to fit into certain sports that they should be doing so that their peers are not fitting in with what their other peers look like and I think what I've taken from this is that we need a person-centred approach that recognises the diversity in resources that girls have, the diversity in girls' bodies, the diversity in opportunities and thank you so much for all your contributions because it's amazing. Good, well that concludes our evidence session for today and thank you very very much to all the panel. That was absolutely fascinating and thank you to all the participants. I thought they were pretty fascinating too. I now close this session and we'll move into private session.