 Good morning and welcome to the 13th meeting of the Health, Social Care and Support Committee in 2023. I have not received any apologies for today's meeting. Before we commence this morning's meeting, you will notice that the convener is not here. The convener has been appointed to a ministerial role and as such can no longer serve as convener of the committee, so I am sure that colleagues will join me in wishing Jillian Martin well in her ministerial role and thanking her for her service to the committee. I will convene the committee until such times as we have a new convener in place. We are joined this morning by Claire Hawke MSP as a substitute member and our first item is to ask Claire to declare any relevant interests to the committee's remit. Thank you, convener, and I can declare that I am a registered mental health nurse currently registered with the NMC. The second item on the agenda this morning is to decide on whether to take item 5 in private. Are members agreed? We are now going to move straight on to our fourth evidence session as part of our inquiry into female participation in sport and physical activity. This session will focus on elite sport. I am delighted to welcome to the committee Ailey Doyle, who is a retired track and field athlete and board of directors at Scottish Athletics. Gemma Faye, who is a retired international footballer. Corrie Ramsey, who is a retired Commonwealth judo champion. Joining us remotely this morning is Priyannas Chatterjee, international cricketer. Lee Craigie, who is a retired professional mountain bike racer and director of the adventure syndicate. We are going to move straight into some questions this morning. I am going to start off by opening up the questions on a fundamental issue to a lot of this, which is money and the finances involved in being able to support elite sport. I am going to ask for each of your reflections essentially on is there sufficient funding within your sport for professional and aspiring female athletes to train and compete? If not, what do you think can be done about that lack of funding and resource? I wonder if we can maybe start with Ailey. I am quite fortunate in terms of my sport. If you get a certain level, if you reach a certain level, you get UK funding. Throughout my whole career, which was spanned 12 years, I was on funding from UK sport, which was a basic salary, if you like. That allowed me to be a full-time athlete. To help as well, you could access sponsorship deals and things like that. In terms of athletics, it was fairly set in stone. You knew what you had to achieve to get a certain level of funding to get that stage. It was the same across the board, same for men and women, so there was no disparity across there. It was the same for events as well. Probably I come from a more luckier sport that everything was pretty straight forward. Football is an interesting sport. If we take the professionalisation of the men's game, it happened in the late 1800s, and effectively women's football was banned from after the First World War until 1972 in Scotland. If you are looking comparatively, I am trying to do the maths here, but women's football is probably about 80 years behind where the male professional game is. Within that 80 years, you have a build-up of several things that results in the male professional football that you see today. In terms of professionalisation of the women's game, when you talk about professionalisation, there are two parts. You talked about money, that is one part. The bit that comes before the money is the infrastructure, the mass, the building of the product, and the opportunity to be a professional athlete in terms of being able to train, having access to those facilities to train, having access to good quality coaches that know how to progress you, having the ability to have enough time to rest and recover properly. My experience, and I can only speak from my experience, is that when I started playing football, which I have to count now in my head, I started as soon as I can remember, but when I started playing international football, I first got into the senior team when I was 15. I retired when I was 35. It took probably about 15 or 16 of those years to get to a point where people started to take women's football seriously. That challenge is not just a sport challenge, that challenge is a societal one. I think that we will be naive to think that sport can in any way shape or form supersede the attitudes that society has to women and women in sport. When you see a change in the attitudes to women in society, you see a change in the attitudes of women in sport. When I retired, I was a professional athlete, and I was a professional athlete not in this country but in Iceland. For me to do that, I had to take a sabbatical from my full-time job. Prior to that, being in Scotland, I dropped my hours down to part-time to allow me to be as professional as I could be. If you are to ask me now in Scotland, can you be a professional footballer and can you be recompensed for being a professional footballer to the level on which it allows you to not work? Yes, you can. You can. There is not enough of it. There are still clubs out there that operate in the top league that are not. I would still deem them as being semi-professional in the fact that they earn more than it costs them to train, but there are definitely clubs that invest into the women's teams to allow them to be professional footballers. That being said, I would argue that most business models are still relying on the men's game to bring in money to seed fund as you would a start-up the women's game to drive that forward. We are still not in a place where I think women's sport pays for women's sport, which is not where we want to be but is the reality of where we are due to the nature of how long it is taking to get women's sport to where it should be. In judo, we are UK funded as well, and we are also supported by the Scottish Institute of Sport. Just as Ailey was saying, it also goes by how well you are doing. If you are achieving at a certain level, you will get on more funding. The sponsorship side of judo is not really there. If you have maybe received a medal at the Olympics or Worlds, you might get something, but apart from that, there is absolutely nothing to do with judo. You do not ever hear about it, you do not ever really see about it, which is quite scary with the success that we have had with judo in the real Olympic Games. We had a bronze medal in London, we had two medals, we had a bronze and a gold. Two of them athletes, one from Rio and from London, were training in Scotland. To get the funding, you have to go to the national training centre, which is down in Walsall. For somebody like myself, who has come from the north of Scotland, a place called Tain, to travel all the way from Tain to go down to Walsall to change my whole lifestyle, where I have already moved to Edinburgh to train, it is quite a difficult thing to get that sort of funding. The funding is there, UK sport is very good at funding people, I just do not know if it is enough to keep pushing people and to have people go, okay, this is what I want to do with my career, they have had to pick or choose whether it is heading down that line or if they have to sell fund to achieve them medals to then get put on funding, so it is a little bit of a mixed bag there. In cricket, I would say that it has been largely amateur for a long time and things are slowly starting to change, but from what I have heard from other speakers, I would say that we are still probably quite far behind. This month is the first time that any of the women have received contracts and they are part-time with most of them being one day a week. We obviously have to work in other jobs to support ourselves, echoing what Gemma said. I went down part-time at work to try and fit in all my training, but that is obviously at my own cost to myself. A lot of players go elsewhere to play for those playing opportunities, and with those playing opportunities sometimes more payment comes. Players have gone and played in England, in New Zealand and other places around the world, but it is not just about that payment, it is about getting access to those infrastructures that enable you to develop as a player. I have already said that there is access to training facilities, training opportunities, good-quality coaches and match opportunities. That is a massive one for us. Our international fixture schedule is not great. Again, I would say that it is quite far behind. I would say that a lot of other countries have similar rankings to us. When you look at where Scotland women are ranked in the world, we are the only country that does not have contracts in place within that top 15 or so countries. There are a lot of challenges that we are trying to overcome. From a cycling perspective, like many of the others, it is a publicly funded sport of cycling, so it is neatly under British cycling. There was always money around, and at the time that I was racing professionally, there was a real opportunity to operate full-time in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games that is being hosted in Scotland. There was a real drive behind putting money and resources behind Scottish sport in particular, so we drew a little bit more money than we would have normally had up from the south. In the preparation years to get to that point, it was very much like the others have been saying. I lived in the Highlands of Scotland, too. I did an awful lot of travel to the south, which fortunately Scottish Cycling was able to help me with. For many of those years, it was only in the year before the Commonwealth Games that I was able to go full-time, and that was only as a result of commercial sponsorship. That is a really different story in mountain biking. In particular, there is money in the bike industry to pay people to ride bikes. There is a lot of sponsorship out there, but if you are a woman, I think that the rules are different to attracting—or they were when I was racing—the rules were different to attracting that kind of commercial sponsorship. I was very lucky, but I do speak from a place of privilege at a partner that supported me, a partner that would travel with me and supported me financially. That was the only way that I could do that. When I was at those events, especially when I was travelling down south to try to qualify for the Commonwealth Games and abroad, it was obvious that I looked like everybody else. Everybody else that was there doing the sort of stuff that I was doing looked like me. There were people that could not afford to do that. I just simply went there. Although the sport was funded, it was for people like me that still had those opportunities. Thank you for those contributions. I thought that that was a very interesting insight into the challenges and opportunities in funding. A number of you touched on your journey into professional and elite sport, and I can explore that a wee bit in terms of what are the challenges that young women and girls experience in trying to access those pathways and, as I suppose, being able to be sustained on those pathways, and what further action could be taken in order to support them? I do not know if you want to make a comment just because you have spoken a bit about your own pathway. The information that I will give about my journey does not necessarily play into where we are today in football, but, in terms of a number of things, it is geographical. I grew up in Perth. I was fortunate that there was a girls' football team in Perth, but we played in our local league, which was from Dunfermline up to Stonehaven. That was our local league that we played in. I grew up in a single parent family with my mum and five kids. It was a challenge to be able to afford for me to be able to go and play in those matches to afford football boots. I think that that is more of a challenge today than it was back then, because I think that it is extortion at the price that you pay for those types of things. When I graduated out of age grade play, the challenge was then to go and find a senior team that was on the level that I was and to be able to afford to go and play for them, because travel expenses were not a thing back then. I played up in Aberdeen, so I used to get the train up when I was 15 years old and to play up there. I also played for area nighted whilst living in Perth, so I would get back at one o'clock in the morning on a Friday morning and go to school. That was my experience of trying to access a sport that I loved. I enjoyed the level that we were given the opportunity to try and progress. I do not think that those challenges are as apparent today, but there will definitely be. As you professionalise the sport, this is one of the challenges to get into academy teams, etc. It is the same challenge that you will ultimately see in the male game in terms of those that are good enough to access the opportunity versus those that are not. However, the cost of equipment—if you are not in a club, that will pay for your training or for the facilities, etc. The cost to access a facility, especially if I was to equate somebody who grew up the way that I did, which was a single parent family, that has more than two or three siblings, you all want to do a sporting activity, you all require equipment, you are all growing, there is the peer group pressure to look a certain way and be a certain way in that environment as well. All of a sudden, you need to access different facilities all over, depending on where you are. If you are lucky enough to perhaps live in the central belt, you might have more opportunities for those living rural communities and the ability to access them. If you are a talented athlete, you perhaps are relying on others to support you on that journey to give you the opportunity. In terms of the Scottish sporting system, and it is interesting because we have people that are from the north of Scotland, a lot of the challenges you have is finding from a football perspective, and I currently work within Scottish Rugby as well, it is true to be qualified and experienced individuals in areas outwith the central belt that are able to provide the same service and same opportunity. There are some fantastic partnerships and opportunities that exist, for example up in Inverness, with the Highlands and Islands University, but it is a challenge to provide those opportunities to those individuals within a relatively accessible locale that will support them on that journey to becoming a professional or an international athlete. Those are some of the challenges that I faced that perhaps now youngsters may or may not face depending on their socio-economic background and on the accessibility to the right level of coaching, but the right access to the right facilities that will support them in their development. I will bring in my colleague Paul Sweeney, who has some questions on this theme. Thank you, convener, and thanks for your insights to quite different economics behind each of the sports. Just really to ask as a follow-up to your points about income and sort of precarity in different sports, what would good look like for you and your particular sport? What would that perfect balance look like and what kind of business model would the sport need to evolve into for that to be the case? Have you got any kind of insights as to where it needs to move to? Maybe Jim, if you could just kick us off. It's a challenging one because, let's take football for example, each club has their own unique business model. I'll start off by saying that I don't think that we should compare ourselves to England. I know that that's a popular thing to do, especially within women's football when we see the success of the lionesses and the success of the WSL down south. It's their ability to dive into the pockets of an FA which struck a deal with broadcasters over 40 or 50 years ago, which is one of the richest FAs, their PFA, which is one of the richest, if not the richest, PFA. The same deals don't exist in Scotland. The same rights that come into the male game around broadcasting, etc. It doesn't touch the sites. So what you're finding down south is the investment into women's football, by the way, has taken about 25 years to materialise into what we see now. You can't necessarily marry that model, so therefore you have to do what's right for Scottish football and what's right for women's football within Scotland. I have been and always have and continue to be an advocate of what we do in the women's game doesn't have to be what we do in the men's game, in any sport, be it team sport and individual sport, has to be right for what's right for that sport at this moment in time, given the context in which we're working it. You could go down the line of arguing, historically, we've underfunded women's sport for 80 years, therefore we should level everything up, but you can't ignore the fact that most of the funding that comes into the sport such as rugby or sport such as football comes through the male avenue. So in terms of boards, in terms of leadership positions, there has to be a conscious decision there that actually two things. One, we've underinvested in 50% of the population, and two, there's a growth in business opportunity to develop it into a market which we've untapped. So those two things play to both, I wouldn't say ideologies, but both thoughts that should exist within that situation, i.e. there's a massive opportunity for our sport and our business, so let's not forget that a lot of these sports are businesses and that's how we have to operate them, but also there is a moral and a social reason why we should do this as well. So the current business models rely on sports actively making a decision to use money that comes into the sport primarily through the male routes and saying we shall and we should invest in the women's game, in the girls game, in our sport to provide opportunities because actually diversity within our game and diversity within our clubs and diversity within any committee or board etc is a positive thing for society and it is a positive thing for our sport. The challenge being you have to find that money without affecting the thing that brings the money in. So that's the challenge and that's the balance you face. I would like to get us to a place where actually the women's side of the game can pay for itself, it doesn't have to make profit, but as long as it can pay for itself, if anything happens in the male side of the game this is not under threat because we have seen that in the past in many countries that if there's a challenge in the male side of the game what are the things that get cut first, it's youth and it's women's because they are seen as a cost. I like to see it as an investment and it's an investment for the right reasons but there's still a lot of work we need to do in that space to build that business case and build that business plan and by the way I haven't figured it out yet but you can't do it by yourself because the thing that pays for the male game is broadcast, sponsors and investors. We need to get broadcast sponsors and investors on the same page with us when it comes to the women's game and show that potential. There's a lot of research that's done in England through a women's sports trust around about the potential for women's sport to grow. We've seen women's sport grow in England and return etc etc. We don't, I think, have a body in Scotland, an independent body that does that kind of work that supports us in telling that story so that would be another thing for me. That's really powerful and there's quite a contrast between like the Olympic and Commonwealth events because they're quite well resourced. I was wondering whether maybe if Priannaz maybe has a view on cricket maybe we could bring in the others afterwards if that's all right? Sure. Cricket has not been part of the Commonwealth or Olympics until the most recent round of the Commonwealth games were included female cricket as a sport and that came with the opportunity for Scotland to go to the Commonwealth qualifiers I think it would have been January last year so that gave us another opportunity to play some more games, which is what we're just desperate to do. It added another four or five fixtures to our schedule that year, which probably doubled the amount of fixtures that we had. As I've already discussed, funding is a massive challenge for our sport and bringing in opportunities to play and to bring in more funding to enable us to play is really key. Cricket hasn't really been involved in either of those events until very recently so I think that in Scotland it's not got the same kind of history as some of the other sports particularly in the women's space like it's growing but I think maybe touching back on some of the question earlier around and what it was like growing up and playing cricket as a girl or in the pathways and things like that. So I'm from Dundee and when I grew up I was the only girl at my club so I just played with all the boys. I didn't actually mind that. I didn't see that as an issue at the time but I can definitely see how that could be a barrier for young girls if there aren't other girls at the club and I know that that is changing but I think that that will be quite different depending on where you are in the country so for example I know in Edinburgh there's quite a few girls clubs but I'm not sure that that would be the case across the rest of the country. Similarly pathway opportunities were very limited growing up as a girl so I attended regional boys under 15s training again being the only girl there and there are now some regional pathways in place but I think there is still a lot of work to be done. I think it's been discussed quite a lot in a few different sports but the white clothing that's so synonymous with cricket was not ideal growing up as a teenager and you're on your period you're like super nervous that that might show on your cricket white so I think generally there's been a bit of a movement away from whites and I think that's a positive thing. Again it's just about access to facilities, access to good coaching, it wasn't really there going up and I still think there's a lot of improvements we made in that space. Yeah I'm not sure if you kind of wanted to follow up with any additional questions because I don't know exactly what you're looking for with the query around the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics. Paul, Sandesh did have a particular supplementary so you okay if I bring Sandesh in at this point and then maybe come back to some of those issues, Sandesh? Thank you convener. Gemma and Prianna, I do want to ask you because you spoke about business opportunities Gemma and the Mail Avenue of Money but I was particularly interested to see that the IPL in India has created a women's game and it seems a bit like they're building it and they'll get the sponsorship and things will come so is that the type of model that you were talking about and also be interested to know from a cricketer about that as well? That's probably the best place to talk about it. I can from my perception of what I can jump in but I think she's probably the best place to talk about that first. Sure. Yeah so I mean I think the first ever women's IPL is when a massive success and it's been seen that there's been huge engagement across India but also globally and personally that hasn't come as a surprise to me and we've also seen massive interest in the 100 in England. Now I think it's very reasonable to say you know certainly in the cricketing contents like India and England are massive countries with massive amounts of access to money and investment that they can put in that just isn't the same in Scotland and obviously in terms of the population the amount of people that can engage with the sport within Scotland the numbers are completely different if you compare Scotland with like in India however I think it's so clear that when we have actually invested and whether it's in India whether it's in England when people have actually invested in the women's game and they have actually marketed it there is a massive appetite to watch it and there's a massive appetite for commercial organisations to invest and to sponsor but I think exactly it takes that you need the governing body or you need someone to drive it and to be I guess trying to put that investment in up front and then those other commercial opportunities will come around it. I don't know the ins and outs of how they've gone about putting on these massive events and you know how they struck about their deals but it has been really exciting to see and I guess that they've been indicating to see that when sufficient effort goes into these events it's hugely popular and the amounts of money that the players are going away with it are life changing and they're earning more from these events than they actually are from their diagonal contracts and things like that which again you know that's just one bit of the puzzle and I don't think anyone in Scotland who plays cricket thinks they're going to make loads of money out of it but I guess it's like could we get to a point where all of the women playing cricket in Scotland can actually just play cricket as their job and don't have to balance that with their work or other forms of income and I think we're still very very far away from that. I think the challenge is how do you what can you do I wouldn't say to replicate it in Scotland I don't think you can replicate the IPL in Scotland but what can you do to tap into that interest and to tap into that opportunity and again I don't know what the answer is but I also don't know if enough people are thinking about what the answer is maybe that's unfair maybe they are but there's a lot more that could be done and I think it's just we've got to be smart and we've got to be creative about how we go about doing it in a country like Scotland and I'd really welcome kind of cross sport collaboration because obviously some sports are doing a much better job than others and I don't from what I see I don't know that there's enough learning across the sports to to work together to try and do that. Okay thank you. Was there anyone else? I was just going to give up like there's a little bit context there so if you look at the ICC and you look at India in terms of one population so some mass equals even if everybody pays one penny you've got a billion there you've got a billion pounds so the size of a country and the popularity of a sport plays into the infrastructures that can be developed so you have one professional league for women in India with a population of one billion and you have ICC which is one of the richest governing bodies, world governing bodies and so and then you come to Scotland and I'll take rugby as an example which I work in we've got 3,000 women that play rugby, adult women that play rugby and we have no professional clubs right now and we're trying to establish a semi professional league but that's requiring us to collaborate with our Welsh and our Irish partners and the investment into that we are seeking from other bodies but the cost of that just to play seven games in a season is astronomical so the challenge you've got is and I go back to the point that was made earlier first and foremost develop the infrastructure develop the quality coaches develop the quality of training and develop match play opportunities for people to be able to develop themselves and to develop the sport and then maybe in five five years or 10 years you may have something in in Scotland when it comes to for example cricket that actually is a product that big investors will come in and support but if the international team are not even getting enough matches right now that's then going to be difficult to try and replicate something like that so it's a bit like a catch 22 if somebody was to come in and say we want to invest money into this for example would a governing body say actually that's right for us right now maybe not maybe this is right for us but we don't want to invest in that we want to invest in this so it's ensuring that every governing body has the plan which is right for their sport depending on where they're starting from and where they want to go is the first thing that takes into consideration all the steps that are required to build towards the professionalisation of a sport and also understand that actually just because you play a player today and it's the player that you didn't pay yesterday doesn't mean that automatically things are going to get better it still takes about 10 years to develop a player so you're not going to see the result of paying professional players for probably five to 10 years depending on the maturity of your system so in essence would everybody like to have a professional women's league or absolutely is that automatically going to change things no it's not and people have to understand that it's not a quick fix it's continued investment over through an infrastructure over a period of time and ultimately the last thing you actually do is pay players but now there's a pressure that you that's the first thing you do but there you're not seeing the results now you have to wait and that's do investors and do governments have the patience to wait for that that investment to to kind of bear fruit that's the challenge okay thank you very much we're going to move on now to discuss media representation and attitudes in society in questions from Emma Harper convener good morning to everybody and good morning to the folks that are online as well i'm interested in media coverage because there's a recent it was a BBC elite british sports women's survey it found that the media coverage had improved but it still wasn't where it should be so i'm wondering what you're so what would your thoughts be on on that from personal experience and then where would you like to see it i suppose taken forward um i think in terms of my sport it's it's kind of all or nothing so it all gets thrown in when there's a sort of a calm of games an olympics and there's a big sort of story obviously we saw last year that you know the eilish mcogan winning the calm of games and the amount of media attention that that brought likes laura muir and her success at olympics in tokyo and things so it's very much it's all in there for those two weeks the championship is on and then that's it's forgotten about and it's obviously because it's current it's the championships that are going on but obviously throughout the whole summer there's various you know events that are going on i think obviously in scotland our our back pages our media is it and everything is dominated by by football you know throughout the whole the whole of the year and it's better it's better probably because the there is more success so you are getting more athletes when i first started it you know my career you know we weren't winning the medals we're winning now so it is better but i think there's still a lot more that can be done you know these guys you look at the success that the scottish athletes have had in comparison to you know it's present is out i will kind of say footballers as well male footballers and you know they should be super stars these guys you know that actually what they've done is is is huge and people don't really know who they are you know they can walk down the street and nobody would bat an island do they not know who they are and and that needs to change there needs to be there needs to be that more coverage that needs to be in that more exposure of the success that's going on because it is it's huge i totally agree that when it's a big games such as conwalls games or the olympics then things are shone on that a lot more whereas when it's not and you've got that two-year gap it's just there's not really anything judo is one of these sports we're quite successful especially in conwalls games and in scotland and glasgo we've got 13 out 14 medals and the coverage was pretty good and then there was nothing that was kind of the end of that in the birmingham games there we had judo player sarah adlington who competes in the over 78s female category who's now double gold medalist at conwalls games and there was just nothing about her being that successful you know and this should be promoting to females that you know are maybe a little bit larger that are trying to you know benefit and to show that sport is available for everybody and they just don't have that coverage as i say when it is going on it is very good but apart from that and in judo i'm not sure the the exact numbers but a lot of the schools we do after schools club breakfast clubs lunchtime club a lot of kids do judo but they don't know what it looks like because it's not on the telly so we have to try and explain or show them their own video clips whereas you know if there was maybe a world championship european championship because if it's on the telly and you could promote that to show them and and judo is a weight category sport so you know you've got smaller people large people people in the middle every different type of female body male body competing and i think it's a good sport to to show this that you know sport is capable for everybody but the only way we can get that is out in the media and for a sport like ourselves i just don't think it's enough out of there even you know we're not saying it has to be every single tournament that out there is even i watch some of them and it's maybe not at that level but if you have the major championships and you can promote that a little bit better than even highlights i think it'll promote sport and take that a little bit further just before leigh craigie or others come in i'd be interested in the use of social media because i've used it for the sawie sharks ladies and stuck it up on facebook for instance and when we had the recent world championships ice hockey act in frist at the ice bowl so i'd be interested in from leigh's perspective for mountain biking for instance because there's the gravel championships that seem to be grown which is it's not as fierce as mountain biking but that's still pretty tough as well so i'm interested in what your thoughts are about social media as a way to help like widen the the visibility of women in sport yeah that's a great segue actually that's really helpful because i was going to try and answer this question from a slightly different angle going away from the big broadcast events i'm looking at social media and the power of social media to change the narrative around where women belong in sport and also just to link into that last question what does good look like it's very tempting to say that goods would look like just mass public spending so that everybody can participate in sport from a grassroots level but the the reality of that is is not the case especially in cycling we need to be making these good solid fair connections with the bike industry and there's a lot of money in the bike industry and there's a lot of people trying to sell stuff online in the bike industry but the the sorts of relationships that get established with the bike industry are still very misogynistic if we're looking at the promotion of women mountain biking online the idea is to for people to see that online and then go back to what it is that they go back to online shops to see what it is that they're wearing or she looked good in that i'll buy that but when you go back to what these brands are representing what they're selling they're selling bikes that are too big for us they're selling equipment that we can't use that our hands don't don't function on they're selling a range of clothing that is anywhere between pink and pink and purple you know there's not the there's not the the range of diversity that lots of different types of women can tap into and so i think when it when it comes to media coverage we need to be looking at our commercial partnerships better we need to be bringing them up to help them understand the importance and the power of of diversity because there's not this huge range of stuff for for men and then there's the women's section there needs to be there's a similar range for for women so that all these different types of women can look at all these different types of being being in sport in particular against being in male dominated sports like mountain biking and see i belong in in this space so social media coverage when it comes to mountain biking is incredibly powerful but there's work that needs to be done to to level that up to make sure that women are getting the same opportunities and to promote the way that they want to look like they want to be on a bike in a really fair diverse representative in a way otherwise we're just not doing our jobs sure i mean i wanted to ask about the clothing issue that li had brought up as well and about that but i can come back to that if you want i wanted to pick up on on something you said earlier jem about the sort of societal attitudes behind some of the things that we're seeing in particular how how that comes out in the in the media a lot of the media sports reports you'll see for example them comment on fixtures from the Chelsea team but then the Chelsea women's team after and use that sort of language to distinguish between between the two do you think that's damaging to women's sport to sort of have that and not have Chelsea men's Chelsea women's rather than the Chelsea team almost giving that second class distinction between between the two or do you think that's a do you think that's a conscious thing or do you think that's something that we need to continue to challenge look i think it's it's dependent sport so Chelsea were Chelsea ladies and Chelsea Chelsea women made a big point of saying we're now Chelsea women i believe because women is seen as a more empowering and powerful terminology and i agree with that i think my personal my personal opinion is i think ladies is somewhat submissive as a term different sports take different approaches within rugby it's the rugby world cup it's not men or women it's just the rugby world cup independent in the year it plays and you should know which one it is so we've got rugby world cup 2023 i think we all know that's the men's one this year but we had a rugby world cup in 2025 or we'll do in england which will be the women's football an international level going down a different way they've said the men's world cup and the women's world cup and i think that a lot of the time a lot of the time there's commentators there's commentators in everything we talked about social media it's a brilliant tool it is also it is also a horrific place to be at times as well so we need to be very very careful a horrific place to be with people who have uneducated opinions and can do a lot of damage but at the same time it is a mechanism on which to take control of your narrative as well um those in sport um when i when i played in football the us national team they called themselves the uswnt so we then called ourselves the swnt because we that we own that name so it's got a women's national team then this got to say i face started using it for us as well but we knew that was us it defined us i didn't have a pro i personally didn't have a problem saying that i played for scotland i played for scotland if people wanted to say you played for scotland women i say it's not i play for the scotland's national team um i personally as an individual as a player playing did not have a problem with that others might have a problem with it i didn't have a problem with that because i knew that i was a female i was a woman and i was playing for the national team um and that i knew that that was where that was that was mine i didn't have a problem with it um there are others arsenal i think of moved to just arsenal um but that i hope would be in consultation with our women's team some women feel very strongly about having women associated with their titles others feel very strongly about not having associated with their titles i don't think that there should be a directive from us a society to say that that makes you a second class citizen if actually the people in the situation say no actually we want that there that that's on purpose and i'm pretty sure chelsea if it nobody's I ever met Emma Hayes she's a pretty you know fierce woman they don't want women in the title it wouldn't be there so that's my opinion on it no and i think that's that's a really powerful thing about claiming claiming the narrative as well for the individual the individual teams and the individual um sports people as well we've got um we've got the broadcasters in next week to the to the committee if there was one thing you would want us to raise with with them what would it what would it be i think for me there's um there's a question of planning here what is their plan to increase exposure of women's sport or women in sport across the various channels and what's preventing them from doing it now i live in a world of strategic planning it's my job you know what's her outcome how are we going to get there where we are now what are the measures in place and how are we going to hold ourselves accountable to about whether or not we do or we don't do it there's there's no like there's no doubt in my mind like it's a it's a it's a cheesy phrase but it's true if you cannot see it you cannot be in i'll tell you right now i know more about kebadi than i do about other sports because when i was younger it was on channel four every sunday morning when i woke up and i used to play it with my brothers in the living room and my mum hated me for it but i could tell you about kebadi i could tell you about the rules because i was fascinated about it because it was different it was new and i had exposure to it and like i've watched judo i've watched it in the major championships i kind of get it but not really i haven't seen it enough i could tell you some of the female judoka because i've worked in sport if i hadn't worked in sport i couldn't tell you who they were so if we want to if we want people to aspire to be something in this world i.e not just an influencer because that's what they see then let's show them the opportunities that there exists to be strong powerful women in the sporting world and what are they and what does that look like i know that having worked in the sports industry in terms of trying to nail down a contractor sorry a broadcaster it's very difficult i have to take my hat off to bbc alba who seem to be the entry broadcaster for most female sports in scotland be that because it's cheap and it doesn't cost them anything it doesn't matter at least they're giving exposure i mean there was a recent you guys will know there's a recent thing around about the the men's national football team about trying to get that back on free to air well you can watch the women's national football team on bbc scotland online and also on bbc alba you can watch the the scottish women's rugby team through the six nations but even then it's a struggle to get broadcasters to accept that that is you know even pay for it they don't pay for it but i'm going to say the flip side of that is i don't know what their challenges are i don't know what they're being told they must provide but if there was a policy in place and a plan in place by x date we should have x percentage of women's sport and it should be diversified across these categories then i think that would be a positive step because at least we all know we're working towards something and you know what gets sports in together with the broadcasters hash it out and see what that looks like and some people won't be happy because there's not enough but i'm sure there'll be more than there is when it has been and we move on to sandesh gohani just now it would also be helpful if colleagues could just direct their questions just to make sure we're we're getting a good spread so i'll take sandesh and then i'll come to Paul Sweeney thank you a couple of questions if i may um it's about coverage ailey and um cony you both spoke about coverage um and i'll will direct my question to jemma um because i'm an arsenal fan and the arsenal women's team are very well represented tim stillman in right uh ars blog there's a podcast which is exclusively about arsenal women so i can tell you that kim little got injured i can tell you that uh meadamard did acl i can tell you things uh meadamard acl i can tell you things about the women's game that i could never have told you five years ago 10 years ago because there is dedicated coverage and i find it really fascinating now and is that something that we're missing in scotland uh yes um and it comes down to a couple of things would you i'll ask the question would you have that coverage if for the last i mean it's the 10th year anniversary of the wsl if the wsl wasn't on bbc if the fa hadn't paid for a programme to be on which by the way first of all when the highlights package was 1145 a night on a tuesday um if bt hadn't taken it if sky wasn't showing it you wouldn't be that interested because you wouldn't know existed you wouldn't know who these people were i mean i could tell you stats about kim little from last 20 years because i've known her that long and i'll tell you right now if kim little was english she would have been balloon door winner three or four times she is one of one of the best and people shoot me down if not the best footballer this country footballer not male or female footballer this country has ever produced but because she's not on social media because she um because she isn't english and hasn't been in the english team and hasn't gone to world cup finals etc etc she's she's not known for the player that she is or could like that she has been um so we don't have the exposure in this country across the sports therefore we have a niche podcast market that is run by people that only know the sport and is listened to by people that only know the sport it's not listened to by people that don't know the sport and could get into the sport because it's not backed up by anything you have a podcast on something that people have gone to watch matches that haven't been televised i don't know what you're talking about because i didn't see it but if there's a podcast that's there and it's talking about an incident actually i've got a different opinion to that because i saw it and i witnessed it so it goes hand in hand we don't have the individuals that are reaching out to the masses because the exposure and as these two women beside me talked about and also on the screen it's it's like flashing a pan Commonwealth Games comes along we all know who wins at the Commonwealth Games but ask in six months time can we remember it oh not really because it's not getting backed up and so just on that so i want to turn to alia and connie here i mean i'm on the bpc of sport website here and i'm looking down and the first time we see women's sport spoken about is quite a long way down and it's a video highlight package um that that they've got about rugby um and um and you know jenny you spoke about you transworld sport or something exactly that i wanted to talk about because it's free to air everyone when i was a kid knew about kebuddy everyone did we played it in the playground and we got banned because we had interests but but the fact is we all knew about it because it was on tv and we all played it is there a lack for for judo for example that we don't have a highlights package we don't have a a tv free to air where people can see day to day judo for example um yeah i definitely think so and just even with germa there i am a really big football fan i go to football games um and i'm getting more interested in women's football as well and i think it's just the way that i've been growing up you know that it's always been the men's side of things but now that women's sports and i've got more time rather than focus on judo being retired athlete i can get to see a wider range of sports i check up on the women's football scores on the bbc website anytime they're playing and they're not updating it the game's gone on live and nobody's you know taken a second of their time to update to know the score i have to wait a few hours after the game to find out what these scores are unless i really look into the media so even simple things like that is in my eyes is really not acceptable you know for judo and highlights we have names titles of tv programmes sports scene all it might be is one dedicated sport why not have a highlight show where it's shown all different things you know people's results from athletics judo mountain biking whatever it is cricket and opening the eyes of these different sports and getting people's names out there and getting people talking about things when when people do well you know you go i might meet my friends for lunch or whatever and you say oh did you see so-and-so they've done well who then goes to another friend to talk about it and that word gets spread just amongst people talking amongst themselves whereas if you've not got that if people don't know the information you can't talk about it you can't spread the word so yeah i think just either you know it doesn't have to be our long shows five minutes ten minutes of just little short snippets of things and i think that will really benefit in in the whole scottish media yeah i just wanted to reflect on the point i was maybe touched on earlier about olympic and commonwealth events it seemed to me like the watershed for british sport in many ways was atlanta 1996 when we had the worst ever performance i think it was 36 the uk came in the medal table one gold medal 15 medals overall after that there was a transformation with the pumping in of lottery funding into those sports and i think it's fair to say that that's been fairly targeted into sports which the uk or team gb regard as the best prospect for medals so i think disproportionately cycling rowing swimming and athletics receive the lion's share of lottery funding or uk sport funding do you see that as having a direct impact on the change in transformation of societal regard for those sports particularly around say the 2012 olympic games the 2014 commonwealth games could sports like judo for example benefit from greater investment in that way and that would similarly with that security that focus on excellence in coaching then build a sort of performance level that that's been achieved that then is improving public perception proving engagement improving interest in the sport as i've created a virtuous cycle in your view and for those particular sports maybe maybe start with aily because you're in background and maybe also cycling yeah i think i think there's a lot a lot in that i think obviously with with the funding and everything that is geared towards the big event so everything's kind of put towards the commonwealth games or the the olympics and i think the most important thing is how you then build off that and everything you know we look at judo i mean in 2014 i mean i remember it was the reneg sisters that won the first gold medals for scotland and they became massive and they were thrown around to the limit it was you and Burton who carried the flag for scotland and so like to say they had that massive exposure we talk about legacy we talk about what happened after that what happened to you know where did the reneg sisters go from there what happened to judo with you know the success there what's happened i think that's where we need to really you know look at and build on that you know from an athletics point of view we had a really great games we've all got we've gone on to have success athletics but but you look at certain facilities and venues and nobody you know it's cost of fortune to get access to the emirates you know to get in and use that that was meant to be this this you know venue that was the future swimming pools you know you look at this instead of dunking scott you know rosmar duck these guys that were massive in these games and we're losing swimming pools so i think what we're the important thing is is you know the the money that's there where's it going how's it being used i sometimes think with with lotty funding and i might be going off on a bit of a tangent here but that you know looking at medal targets and all that i don't like medal targets i understand why they're there i understand why you need them to i don't think it i don't think it shows how successful sport is i think it can hide things likewise i think it can not show you the full picture i mean it takes for me for example women had a really successful beijing olympic games and yw cysbod pumped a whole load of money into them after beijing london they didn't they only got a couple of medals so they lost all their money but then we only came back and had a great games so if you look at the pattern there actually the money that's going in there is not reflective of the success or the perceived success of that sport so yeah it's the it's not just about yeah throwing money at a sport it's about understanding what does that sport need um it's come back to what jemo was saying like every sport is different it's got different needs and and you know where is it starting point where where is it going to be invested and what does it require to have success and what does success look like for that sport that's really powerful thank you maybe an insight from the cycling leif you've got any thoughts yeah i'm just listening to ele there i was i was definitely on on board with what she was saying i hate metal tables as well cycling did get a huge injection of of money into after atlanta it's true but it's interesting when you break down cycling you know there's all the medals get get one on in the track there's i don't know how many medals exactly i'm not a track cyclist but if you go to the track then there's tens of medals can be one on the track there's one medal can be one on road or in mountain bike but when you're looking at the the sports that young people can can get into you don't look at a track event and think oh yeah i'll just nip down to my local track and i'll get into that it's the kids that are cutting about on their bmx is outside um outside in the street that you know that the kids that are more likely to to go off into the woods and learn to be mountain bikers you know what is elite sport if it's not about inspiring those kids and i would and this is the this is the distinction between focusing so hard on on on the the medals which is what ultimately gives our national governing bodies their their funding and actually what it is that elite sport is for because in in my mind it's about inspiring the next generation it's not about encouraging folk to sell stuff or about promoting the people that can live next to a track and can afford to go into one and teach themselves this really specific skill um so so yeah i think i think we've got work work to do that if we're going to use sport in the way that i think it is intended thanks just thinking of beth shriever who's had to crowdfund our way to go medal at tokyo you know in bmx when you think the context of cycling being a well resource sport you know we do need to move on to the next theme um which is going to be focusing on periods pregnancy and parenthood and related issues and on that i'll bring Emma Harper in to just ask that question around clothing um that we had in the previous panel if that's okay just briefly yeah no that's fine that's great um so i was reading over the weekend that the norwegian beach handball team were fined for not wearing um the regulated bikini for the beach handball because they came out in shorts and and the bottom line was like they'd campaigned for 15 years to not wear bikinis because uh because sometimes they fall down they slip up and you know they're not comfortable so so there's been issues around what uniforms are supposed to be worn and then what could be available so i was also reading about sports hijabs for women so and and actually allowing women to to then choose what they can wear that would be comfortable and precipitant sport so that seems to be growing for women that want to then align with the teachings of islam for instance so and lee mentioned earlier about only uniforms being pink or purple or in between so what are your thoughts around like availability or the clothing the the comfort the sizes the whatever we need in order to be um to help support the participation of women and girls in sport especially adolescent girls um not sure who wants to go and do it ailey well yeah well it's it's something that athletics has been looking at and it's um it's kind of used to just kind of have a standard outfit and the women always wear the sort of crop tops and and pants really and the men would wear their shorts and vest and over the years with sponsors getting involved like nigh caradillas and things like that they've given a whole wide range now so so you know there's a more of a choice there for for women to feel more more comfortable and and men as well and um one of the things that that that is not great though is i've run well i used to run as part of a really team as well and one of the rules that they have in athletics is everybody in the really team has to wear the same outfit and when they brought this rule in i was one of the sort of senior members of the team so thankfully i was you know a little bit more confident to to come in and say well look i don't wear i don't wear the pants i'll wear i wear the shorts that's what i'm more comfortable in and there was younger members in that team that would normally wear you know the pants and the crop top and and they sort of were happy enough to say okay that's fine you know but if i'd have been a younger member going into that team and saying oh i don't want to rock the boat i'll just wear what i'm not really particularly comfortable with you know and the thing is you're going to need to do a performance the last thing we're thinking about is what you're wearing you need to be out there and being comfortable um i think the what we need is just people within in governing bodies and their organizations just aware that that's an issue so it's something you know you need to have a safe space where the you know you're able to talk about well what what can we wear how can we make everybody comfortable what are our options you know can we wear this can we wear that so yeah i definitely think that it's there's conversations that are going on and it is getting better but i think there's still a lot of you know a lot of stuff there and like i say any young woman you know or any younger watching athletics you know do they look at and think oh i have to wear a crop top i have to wear that you know when i want to be an athlete and i think it's about yeah just making sure that there's people in there that can have those conversations and just make sure everybody's kind of comfortable what it is that they're wearing i do you need to move on so i'm going to bring in everyone tweet for questions on this theme thanks convener and good morning to you all and i've really enjoyed your contribution so far this morning in our call for views respondents felt that there was little provision in elite sport for pregnant athletes or athletes that had children does your sport make provision for these athletes and what more support could be provided and emma is nodding sorry jemma is nodding that's what i get called i get called so many things don't worry about it so this is a really interesting one um and we so from my Scottish rugby hat we're doing a piece of work at this moment in time looking at we just given professional contracts for the first time looking at what our policy around pregnancy parenthood adoption um egg storing all this kind of stuff because the reality is when you're at your peak performance level you're also at your peak first-reality level that's that's reality um what we don't want is we don't want athletes to to fear and my generation it wasn't it there's one athlete i know my generation who who came back from a pregnancy um but that was it the kind of it wasn't really a thing it wasn't it wasn't talked about um it wasn't discussed and the assumption was that like when you had a child that was kind of you unless you had a support system around you that could support you to get back to to peak fitness and be available for selection there's a lot of work that's being done at this moment in time in this space i think the gold standard out there in terms of this is probably new zealand cricket who have a four-year pregnancy and parenthood policy that they support their athletes with um what we need to do first and foremost is understand from an athlete perspective what their thoughts are around it what they feel pressures around what they feel um you know what their thoughts are around that situation what is it they would like to do in that situation then you need to marry that up with existing pregnancy or maternity policies that exist within your organisation then you need to understand that the uniqueness of that job because it is a job being an athlete what are the unique situations in that that actually would impact their ability to breastfeed impact their ability to bond with their child impact their ability to come back from pregnancy and it's not an injury it's often associated as let's treat it the same as an injury it's not every individual female is different how they react to it is different somebody's postpartum journey could be completely different from somebody else's so how does that impact on your contract etc etc so i can attest to that this moment in time particularly within rugby there's a lot more work being done in that space than has ever been done before we talked to our athletes about it we're trying to develop a policy which is supportive to them as an athlete to them as a parent but also to the what they potentially are being selected into to be able to support um i know for instance a former player of mine and the women's national team currently takes her child with her when she's with the national team and that policy i don't know what the policy is with sfa but it allows for her to be there so i think that we are in a position now when we've only recently started talking about this within professional women sport so everybody's on a journey and i think the question would be if your governing body is not on that journey why not because it's not it's it's something that they need to get on and if your governing body is on that journey let's collaborate together as governing bodies to make sure that we share best practice in this area to support female athletes to allow them to be the best athlete they can be but also the best parent they can be if they so choose to do so during their their sporting career does anyone else want to come in because well i had a i had a baby in 2019 so i was still an athlete when i decided to get pregnant and at that time there was no policy in place since then um uk sport i believe it is it's put the policy in place now that you can't be taken off funding so if you decide to have a start a family you'll still be you'll still get funding for another year and be taken off and um i think that's that's a really you know big step because during that time i was sort of looking at other work because i wasn't sure if i'd be kept on funding um when it went came to i was funding discussions were october i was due in january so you know it could be a situation that had you know a two three month old son and had no income so thankfully that policy has changed and what i think needs to to just be improved on is just the understanding kind of the support that's there and just being able to have open conversations it's very secretive you know you feel like you're hiding a horrible secret when you know you decide to start a family or you know and it's all about who do i tell who do i tell first when do i tell them you know and this it should be such a great moment and but also you know you do have those worries i don't want to tell anybody too early you know that goes for the media you know coaches head coaches so i think there needs to be a lot of open dialogue where female athletes you know feel comfortable having those discussions and knowing that there's that support in place and again like jemma says every single person's pregnancy is different every single person's labour is different everybody's mindset will be different you know when some people might say i want to come back after having a baby then you have the baby decide actually i don't want to come back to my sport so and i think that's okay i think it's just making everything okay and supporting so yeah it's it's good that it's the things are now happening and developing but yeah i think there's still a lot that can that can be done can i bring in Stephanie at this stage everyone is that okay yeah we're bringing Stephanie thanks very much community and thanks for being here today for me went out to visit in Dunfermline and talked to some of the sport governing bodies they talked about for example in rugby having flexibility the social aspects of it and changing the rules and things and we went to fight and chance to see the judo actually i spoke to an amazing woman who was also a professional rugby player and a mum and what she was saying was that she went to a variety of classes at the judo at all different levels and was able to bring her child along and stuff to there to really get her fitness levels back and continue with her professional rugby now we know that just over one in four respondents to the babyc sports women's survey have said that they felt supported to have a baby and continue competing which isn't a lot and that a third of women do they have in a family so what i'm wondering is you know not withstanding the need for policies and support within sports and organisations as this part of the solution is well you know having that those wider sports as well that women can be involved in that they can take their children along that contribute to getting back to being competitive as well in other sports so i don't know who would want to pick that one up i don't know Connie if seen as judo's part of it yeah um yeah i think it's a really big thing and even if you take away elite athlete side of things um i had opened up my own gym and had been trying to work with women that had no confidence to go into a normal gym that themselves and it's actually astonishing the amount of people that won't step foot in the gym coming from sport and black ground and judo since i was four years old and that just always been around sport for me i couldn't believe it when i you know why don't you want to do sport like you know it's fun this you know this is the lifestyle and i learned a lot and that's what i was trying to encourage was you know as soon as you fall pregnant a lot of people in just society was oh i'm pregnant now i can't do any exercise you know and it's trying to change the mindset of people and as well of once they've had the baby to then they can start slowly if they're in the right you know if their body is is healed properly and things to get them back into sport so i think it's opening and widen people's kind of attitudes towards it as well and trying to really encourage people that you know there's ways and means about it and getting professionals to come in and help that as well so it's not being from professional side of things you know straight in and back on the judo mat getting thrown and thrown people and sparring with people maybe we have to look at it and and try and make sure that it's the right thing for people and give people encouragement to be able to come back into the sport and and let them access that we've had quite a few judo players recently that have done this as well so i think it must be a big push in sport with people becoming pregnant and trying to you know help them back into the sport and being a little bit more open. We've got a very successful judo player Nicola Davis an English judo player and i think she'll be one of the first British judo players to come back from pregnancy and she's been selected for the worlds and things again so it's really good and very encouraging and hopefully you know shows other people that it is capable of of doing it so yeah i think as Ailey was saying and Gem up trying to get a variety of people to come together to give the best advice to to how to push forward with this. Do you feel that free period products has made a real difference and what could we do more to help women and young girls? So i play five aside football on a Wednesday night in in the heart of Glasgow and dominated by men in the facility and even going into there there's free period products available which is like there's no change in what i can go into but there's a toilet which has free period products so it's positive. I think the one thing though is is the normalisation of talking about not just periods but the impact that it has on sport and performance. I can remember vividly I was a goalkeeper so hand-eye coordination important thing when you're on your period i'm sure you will appreciate that goes out the window sometimes and when you're playing England and you can't catch a ball it's a bit of an issue but it wasn't talked about in terms of at that point I mean monitoring into that so it was it was a thing that you you took paracetamol you took briefing and you just prayed to god that you could focus on something so the free free period products fantastic but we're still not normalising what actually a period does to a female when she is in her cycle we're not normalising the fact that some could have the lightest period ever and it's over in three days others could have one that lasts seven days and all of a sudden you start to bleed again after another three days others can have let's say at myself the first two days it's a nightmare for me I am popping pain killers can't move and I was expected to train on those days and if I didn't train I didn't go to training because I wasn't feeling well at the time you knew that would count against you but I couldn't turn to my coaches and say by the way I can't train because I'm on my period and it really affects my motor function my perception action coupling and my ability to perform the tasks the best my ability and also if I'm a goalkeeper I'm rushing out and you hit us ball at my stomach it's going to kill me so that kind of piece around about understanding the impact that menstruation has on an elite female athlete's ability to perform their daily tasks is important I know now we monitor it more we absolutely do monitor more we did some great work within within rugby around about collecting that data but data and research into female sports in general is really really really light we we don't have enough of it we haven't done enough research in the past we are doing more now but we we haven't done enough in the past to allow us to then use that information to create practicable applications to the sporting environment which gets the best out of the female athletes whilst understanding the impacts that the female specific things has on female athletes at certain times I also think that you need to look at that from you know just that stage before elite athlete that could maybe affect why we're not pushing into the elite athlete because you're you know you've got teenagers that are coming they might be competing at high level then their period comes and it put them right off we train in white giro kits I mean it's a little bit different with the pink and the the purple you know it's very traditional sport so you have your jacket trousers that's it everything's in white so if you're a teenage girl and you're coming on the mat just like cricket and things it puts girls off and giro has we're also a weight making sport which when you come on your period affects which weight category you compete in so you're getting weighed every day and then you seem to put on two kilos the first thing is you know what have you done have you been going out eating too much you're competing at the weekend well there's actually you know give me a day or so and it should come back down so it's having these conversations with the coaches and things to make an open conversation and I think from the last time that we've been in I've been in a professional setup it was getting there it was you were able to speak to the coach and explain this to them to them so that they have the understanding of it but as I say I think it's stepping back to that teenage stage before maybe you'll be coming up a professional athlete and getting people to discuss it then as well being able to have that conversation we need to move on I'm just very conscious of time but we will certainly if we can at the end I'm going to come to clear hockey now who's going to ask questions on harassment and abuse thanks very much convener and welcome to the panel so I suppose this continues on the themes of barriers really so sexual harassment experience with some female athletes in elite sport was identified as a barrier to participation in some of the calls for evidence that the committee received and in the survey that Emma Harper quoted earlier on the elite British sports women's survey 64.6% of elite female athletes reported experience in sexism in their sport but 75% didn't report that according to the survey so I suppose I'm keen to learn what measures and support there currently is for reporting harassment within within your sports and how adequate you think those measures are in terms of protecting women and girls. Do you want to direct that to the participants who are remote because I'm just really conscious that we haven't heard a great deal from them so I don't know if Lee if you wanted to kick off with that in cycling? Yeah I think it's probably worth highlighting what it is that we take harassment to mean so I'm going to take a step away from the idea that it's blatant. I think there's a in the world of mountain biking there's an undercurrent and has always been it's probably better now than it was when I was racing but there's an undercurrent of because I was surrounded by a lot of men there was a lot of male banter there was a lot of just not very covert exclusion from things and as I got older I became one of the older members of team so I was able to set a different tone and I was I was more senior and as soon as as soon as I or another woman was there to set a slightly different tone then the whole thing changed and that felt incredibly important for the young people coming up and through and seeing this different tone what is acceptable and what is not in the teams that I was operating within and so in terms of reporting I don't know one instance of anybody any young person feeling or any person feeling that they wanted to escalate a matter because it just wasn't the appropriate thing to do it would be that that's all just banter put that to one side but I felt very very strongly at the time that there was just constant undercurrent of undermining sexism going on in the car parks of mountain bike trail centres are are very blokey and it is very intimidating and that is a sexist set of set of circumstances going to repel all sorts of young people from taking part in that sport and so as as as retired sports people our coaches our leaders and the people that represent our sport were all responsible for setting a tone of inclusion in whether that's sexism or or otherwise and I think in mountain biking in particular there's there's work to be done there so I'm interested then in what you say there that the underlying current of harassment or sexism or I think it was interpreted as banter that there would no one would report that what do you think with the barriers to some of those women and young girls reporting how they were made to feel or what was said in the appraisins yeah we had to because we were always in the minority we had to get along and so you're very quickly scapegoated into well she's just she's just being a woman she's just she's making more out of this than needs to be she doesn't understand our humour he had to in order to survive I would quite often be on tour for six weeks at a time I'd be the only woman in amongst a lot of younger guys and if I had asserted myself I tried to change a tone I didn't have allies in that in order to help me set that tone I had no way in authority to help me set a different inclusive non-confrontational tone and so if I had made more of an issue of that which was sort of my responsibility to although there weren't any young women watching it was just me on on my own but had young women been watching then I would have failed them in not standing up and changing that tone but that's an incredibly difficult thing to do if you were the only woman in that space because then you are automatically scapegoated as well whiny and different and not understanding of just you know the humour that that's the sort of stuff that we need to be tackling really early on at a really base level. Thanks very much Lee I wonder who could turn down to Prina's and who who obviously was it is in a a more female environment in terms of her teammates. Thank you, yes so for sure I'm obviously in a team sport that you play in amongst your kind of the gender so I'm in a women's team and that being said cricket is obviously a very kind of male dominated sport and historically has has been very male dominated and I guess in terms of the personnel involved it is still very much that that's the case and I wouldn't say this is specific to Scotland but I would say it's very much still a boys club kind of wherever you go so lots of former male cricketers who like then go on to work in cricket and I think it's also quite a small world everyone knows everyone and I think that that generally can make raising issues quite challenging and in some cases and I think this is often the case in society as well it can be seen as more problematic to raise an issue than to be someone who is is causing the issue if that makes sense so I think there's generally just a lot of if not fear certainly reluctance to raise issues because often lots of things are brushed off as jokes or banter as at least just attested to I think it's really important that there are clear processes in place and certainly I don't think that's that's always been the case in my sport so yeah I think there needs to be these processes in place and people need to know that they exist and what they are but there also has to be trust that if anyone does raise an issue it will actually be dealt with appropriately and I think that comes down to yes they're being processed but also they're being people involved who are willing to I guess have difficult conversations and challenge sometimes their colleagues or sometimes people they work with because I've definitely known of instances and seen it where there's been clearly problematic personnel and people in positions of power were aware but they're kind of happy to brush some of their less good traits aside and say oh well you know but they're doing this or don't really want to rock the boat and I think unfortunately change is not really going to happen unless you're willing to rock the boat and that can look like different things for different people I think having analyzed is incredibly important I can think of instances where I've been in boards for example to do with cricket where I've been the only woman and the only person who's not like and issues of racism or sex have come up and it's been incredibly challenging to call that out because of the power dynamics and feeling like I will be seen as a troublemaker if I do that and there's been times when I probably had to speak to some of the people on those groups like offline and bilaterally and I've been lucky that at least some of the time they have been supportive and we've been able to address these issues to an extent but it's really hard and especially I guess you had a third pattern where I'm still like a fairly young woman and often I'm engaging with you know middle-age or older age men and then you get that third dynamic of the power differential and it's not easy so I don't think there's going to be any like quick fixes but I think it's about certainly having processes in place part of it is just having the right people in place who are actually going to act with integrity and sometimes acting with integrity means having difficult conversations and I guess there needs to be some kind of accountability process or way of people to challenge things if they don't think that that's happening and then trying to encourage cultures where people feel comfortable speaking up about things that aren't acceptable or aren't appropriate. Thank you and I suppose if I could just ask a very quick supplementary to the witnesses in the room from hearing that if that's something that you recognise within your own sports and do you think that the processes that are there are robust enough for women and girls who are currently coming into being elite athletes or currently participating as elite athletes? I think if you look at sport as a microcosm of society which it is because the people that are in sport are not they exist in society as well. It would be naive to think that the things that exist in society don't exist within sport so it's not shying away from that fact but it's about recognising where it does happen how do we call that out and how do we change that and I'll go to the point that was made just there you're trying to change a culture to change a culture you had to change the behaviours to change the behaviours you have to change the attitudes and it doesn't happen like that it's an education process and it takes more people to call out what's not acceptable at least point about banter I understand that completely I used to gauge how well we were doing in women's football based on what the taxi driver would say to me beginning of my career it would be do you switch tops do you shower together towards the end of my career or I saw the game the other night that's that's like in a really short space of time that's showing the changing attitudes towards sport and women in sport and I think that we there are there are systems in place and the point that was made there about are they accessible are they known and we're trying to currently always evolve the systems to ensure that people feel safe enough to report things but understand that if you do report things that they have to be actioned so that's that's a challenging piece here yes there are systems in place to report it but there has to be an understanding that if we want to change it we have to do something with that information when we get it and it's whoever's reporting that understanding that that has to be the case or else it's not a reporting mechanism it's a it's a place just to divulge information which if we can't do anything with it isn't going to create the changes so I think encourage anyone to actually report something if they feel that they are then going to be scapegoated or well it's how you deal with that information but depending on what's being reported um the the responsibility is to say well if there's something of of that's being reported which is sexism misogyn etc then we have to take action with that information and and and speak to the individual to say well this is what we would like to do with that now it's up to unfortunately and this is the case in society as a whole for change to happen brave people need to stand up if brave people don't stand up then governing bodies can't do anything with that information to try and affect change other than doing what they're doing which is trying to put in place plans and policies and work with clubs etc to promote good and positive behaviours but even if you do that even if you do that there's still going to be individuals in there that are just not good people that will continue with that so it is just this constant kind of piece of trying to ensure actually that's not banter that's offensive I do understand the impact that that will have on people and the last piece I would say there is those people that call it out absolutely but there are also the people behind it that have to try and figure a way to change that and these people up here also need to understand that change doesn't happen like this it's going to take time and what I would say is we have a problem if people aren't acknowledging that there's an issue or have a problem if people are not trying to change the issue and we have a problem if that over time the issue doesn't change but you like I said before when you're dealing with people you're dealing with attitudes and you're dealing with behaviours behaviours take a long time to develop they also take a long time to undo thank you we're going to move on actually to talk about inequalities which i think is a really neat kind of segue so we can perhaps draw out some more of this in this conversation so i'll bring David Torrance in at this stage thank you community and good morning to panel members women from ethnic minority communities what are the barriers to participation in your sport and progression in your sport i won't look up to anyone yeah um i think in terms of again in athletics there's there's a very diverse sport it's actually you know again i'm quite proud of the fact that you know it's very accessible you know because it's it's just you know it's running jumping throwing if you can do any of those kind of things it's about being able to get into it and there's very limited sort of barriers in terms of finance at that stage as well and in any other barriers so so athletics is actually one of those sports i think that it's very inclusive um you can do it all over the country um and there's there's not many limitations to it what i would say is that probably is there's a a limit in terms of coaching i think it's very much dominated by white middle class men to be frank um that's pretty much what and that's what you see a lot in the staffing as well i know it's getting slightly better but i think that's one thing that you know young athletes coming into that team that come from ethnic minorities it's the coming into these teams and they're not seeing anybody in the staffing in the coaching group who um they can relate to so i think that's probably one of the barriers that we have within staffing within coaching any other panel members can you repeat this specific question please um i asked um what are the difficulties from women from ethnic minority communities to participate in sport and progress in your sport um happy to try and speak a bit on this i think potentially in contrast to Ailey's comment there unfortunately cricket isn't that accessible of sport just because you need a lot of equipment and facilities um and so you do see um that i think there's much less access for those from kind of working class backgrounds which obviously often intersects with those from ethnic minority backgrounds as well there's a lot of overlap in those two issues but they also have their separate challenges as well um i would echo the comment around staffing and the fact that um that tends not to be particularly diverse um so i would say the majority of staffing be that um coaches and psych support um physios uh strengthening conditioning um are are typically white in my experience um and certainly the skills coaching staff are predominantly male um and i think again that just reflects like the history of the sport in the country like who's been playing it and it has predominantly been um white middle class men i think um in terms of the challenges specifically for ethnic minority women i mean there's there's various different factors and i'm conscious of not speaking behalf on a very on behalf of a very diverse set of peoples um but um i think some of the challenges can be around kind of awareness of you know for example in uh in cricket making sure there's like longer sleeved clothing availability for the players who don't wish to to to wear short sleeve clothing for example um kind of um coming back to the clothing again i think just making sure that there's that choice i think it's just all about enabling women and girls to have the choice to wear what they want to wear whether that is a crop top to run in whether that is a long sleeve top to run in whether that is a hijab whether that's not hijab um i think other factors of consideration is just kind of making sure there's appropriate food available for different um people of different backgrounds i certainly know um i mean i was a vegetarian for quite a long time nothing to do with my i think minority background but i do know that i was at i'd go to cricket events and sometimes a vegetarian option was like just not nutritious at all and contrasting to my teammates who ate meat and they had a much better meal which then obviously affected your performance for like the second half of the game if you're appropriately fed or not um and then i think there's there's also um you know potentially challenges around if clubs don't have um very good facilities for women i think there could be in some cases some reluctance um for some people to um you know go to a club that kind of is exclusively male or exclusively boys and doesn't have provision for girls spaces um so i think those could be some of the issues um yeah thank you convener um in all your sports how welcoming are the two um lesbian and bisexual women and what are the challenges that they face open to anybody so it's the time we just direct it maybe to to one person at this junk shop i'll go jama the food bowl thanks jama um i don't think that i think it's i can't speak on behalf of an entire group but i don't think it was ever an issue sexuality whether that was anything that was ever a barrier i would i would perhaps argue in the past it was actually a welcoming space for for those from the lgt bq plus community in terms of feeling safe and that they owned a space i couldn't comment on how an entire group feel but from a personal opinion my sexuality has never played a part in my participation in sport and never even my sexuality doesn't even come into me thinking about participating in sport doesn't come into me thinking about much to be honest i live my life as an individual and if i want to do something i do it um people's opinions of me doesn't really matter to me i know that's not the case for others but i can only speak from from my sense and i've never felt in any walk of life discriminated against because of my sexuality because i'm actually a really private person and nobody actually knows what my sexuality is it's because i don't i don't lead with that i'll lead with him jama and i enjoy this or i enjoy that so i as i say i can't speak for everybody from that community i can't speak for anybody from any community other than my and me from my own community which is just me by the way but that i have always found sport to be predominantly a safe space for me thank you for that one more question thank you one more and then then we will really need to think about moving to conclude young girls and women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds how difficult is it for him to get into your types of sports and i know mountain biking will be very expensive and so of football for a start so i'm quite happy to hear from any of you yeah of course i would say bikes are expensive and equipment is expensive and the types of faces that you see in mountain biking are are not people from more diverse backgrounds so i think socioeconomically and in terms of ethnic diversity cycling has got a long long way to go and i think that the commercial sector the industry again has quite a lot of work to do in there in order to help us level it up tori jeffin did you want to come in or no it's just on these points is any sport that requires specific equipment there is a barrier there the popularity of that sport as well is also a barrier but i guess that we've got a fantastic network which are schools which can provide an opportunity and i know we also have community sport which has been increasingly under pressure in terms of the ability to fund it and access to sporting facilities but i am a huge advocate of physical and mental health are inextricably linked for me and if we want a healthier happier Scotland moving forward then we need to provide the opportunity for not just girls and women but for everybody to experience the the the positive attributes that being physically active and having access to places to be physically active plays in the longer-term health and wealth of this nation thank you we have three supplementaries and i am conscious that we're over time i mean i just want to check with witnesses that witnesses would be happy to take those three supplementaries are you okay for time and committee are happy to to bear with us okay fine and we can just ask for one sub and directed to one person that would be really helpful so start with Emma Harper thanks convener i will go specifically to Connie because you're free tain and tain is pretty rural and for me Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders is outside the centre belt so my simple question is you know what are the challenges for getting young women and girls to participate in sport in rural parts of Scotland yeah so i moved away when i was 16 i was very lucky that my school was very helpful that i was allowed to do part-time school part-time judo so i would leave i would do school in the monday morning travel down my dad would put me on the bus down i would train monday night all day tuesday all day wednesday he would then pick me up from rathol to drive me back up in time for school thursday friday so i was very lucky to have my parents back in to help me to get wherever i needed to go they would get me there which i find is very difficult for a lot of other girls and boys to to participate and i've actually just moved back to tain so i've been down as a safe since i was 16 i've moved back up and that is one thing that i may mean to do it's a long project that's in my head that i've always wanted to do is to try and encourage people and if i can even give one person insight in the life that i've managed to be able to achieve and and see the kind of the world and not get stuck in that bubble up there then that's what i want to try and do as i say i had the backing of my parents which was helpful and if i didn't have them i wouldn't be where i am now because i wouldn't you know there's can't get put on a bus when you're nine years old when you need to get to Aberdeen for the dual competition or for Glasgow or down south even into London so if i could even be that person that can you know support these people and take them where they need to be get them on the mini bus and take them down to to Glasgow to experience the tournament and see at the level where they could possibly be then i think it'd be quite helpful because right now it's there's just nothing it's just um you know inverness yet you might have the community there but north of that there's not very much going at all which i'm hoping to try and put a little bit insight into that thank you thank you thank you um i don't think it's fair that you get to play ffiverside football no one will ever score past you but just on that if you if you look around yet you said there weren't many women but there's even less ethnic minority women yep um connie you spoke about the gym about how women don't go to the gym but there's even less ethnic minority women than there are women going to the gym um and i think it's important that we talk with you know you guys are all elite sports people and so i want to talk about elite sports what is it um and idiot i want to come to you with my question specifically what is it about elite sports that doesn't have a big ethnic minority group and participation in it because running for example we can all run but we just don't see that translation i'd love to ask you all this question but we simply don't have the time so i'd like to come to athletics well i think it probably comes down to that pathway you know and it's that you know it's that you know my career was very straightforward in terms of you know joined a club had really good experiences there went to competitions um then was had success and then you know had that support around me that allowed me to then be able to travel around the country um but if we are seeing that that you know again i went and it was i went with my friends it was all people like me there wasn't it wasn't a massive you know diverse group as well so when i went i felt like i fitted in and throughout that whole pathway i felt like i fitted in i felt like i was the same as everybody else so is that the barrier there it's the right from the very beginning you know it's getting in it's the start of that pathway and then you know not initially getting in to begin with and and being involved in a group where you feel you belong and i don't know i can't speak from anybody else's experience other than my own but for me i very much felt like i belonged straight away in that and my pathway was very very straightforward to elite so i don't know if that answers the questions but again it could be that that there's you know is it that the gym thing i don't want to go to a gym i don't feel comfortable there i don't want to join a club i don't feel comfortable there i'm a minority i don't feel included i don't feel involved i don't know because if you look at elite elite athletics globally very diverse massive you know every single country does athletics does the sport so so it's not necessarily a barrier to the sport but it's a barrier to a pathway to get to elite level and the final supplementary is actually a question for us to the panel which is obviously a Gillian Mackay reference we have broadcast with us next week so very quickly in a line if you can what do you want us to ask the broadcasters i think Gemma's already i think covered some of this but we'll go to alien and cori and then i'll come to mine just you can ask them if they are conscious of the fact that they talk about women retiring you know would women turn 30 i mean again this might more specific to my sport but when i turned 30 every time i was mentioned in an art a caller or commentator it was coming to the end of her career and bearing in mind i'd just come off of my most successful season i'd won a medal at olympic in 2016 and i turned 30 in the February of 2017 but that whole following year and subsequently till i was retired when i was 35 i was always asked when are you retired and how long are you gonna go none of my male count of parts got asked those questions so you can ask them if they're conscious of actually saying that okay cori my would be the diverse of different sports and how can we kind of stick to kind of the mainstream sports and if there is a access that we're able to to try and pick out different sports that might not be as popular but if we can then use that to try and make people more aware of these different sports to then try and build up sport as a general rather than just certain sports individually i would ask them to do some real digging to find quality informed articulate female representatives of the sport that they are broadcasting on and prioness sure i mean i think i just echo everything everyone said and i would huge agree that there's a massive double standard regarding women's age in sport i'm 29 and the amount that i feel like i'm now considered old whereas my male counterparts are definitely not so i think raising that with broadcast is certainly be good to do i'm i just be interested to know like from their point of view what what do they need to see to for them to invest more in women's sport like what are the barriers from their point of view what are their solutions what do they see as their long-term strategy and understanding how that can be aligned with all the different stakeholders in sport to move things forward for women thank you jemma did you want to add anything or just just one thing on what lee said i think that there's there's a difference between putting women's sport on tv and then putting women's sport on tv and providing the talent as it's called in the biz to support the production of that i personally know from my experience when i used to do a football male football thing i would spend seven hours researching to be told a year later that actually all the men get this information given to them so there is what are they doing to develop talent which has credibility in the women's sport understands the women game in scotland to provide when we do have that production a quality experience for the viewer thank you very much and thank you to the whole panel for your attendance this morning i find that very informative and interesting and i'm sure we could have went on all day but i appreciate colleagues have other other things to get to but thank you for your time okay the next item on our agenda then is consideration of a negative instrument which is the food additives flavorings and novel food authorization regulations scotland 2023 um good to move straight to that yeah but at the paneler i think free to go i should have said that before launching into this um you are of course welcome today um okay the purpose of the instrument is to authorize a new food additive a new food flavoring and a new novel food to be placed on the market in scotland it also authorizes new conditions of use and changes to the specification of an existing novel food the policy note states that the ssi aligns with scotland scotland with england and wales and with similar eu legislation for these products all of which have now been authorized by the eu commission the delegated powers and law reform committee considered this instrument at its meeting on the 20th march 2023 and made no recommendations in relation to the instrument no motion to null has been received in relation to this instrument and i would invite any comments from colleagues at this stage Emma Harper thanks convener i know that i often talk about these instruments that we are approving regarding food additives and flavorings and novel foods but i'm interested in this in the previous session as well as this one and it's just to raise awareness that it is important that people are aware that that these novel foods exist and it's not just about eating insects it's also about additives flavoring food enhancing to be dietary supplements so when i was looking at this one this one is the vitamin the vitamin d2 mushroom powder which is quite interesting as a diet replacement because of the claims of how it can enhance focus and improve anxiety and help people become so so that's pretty much what i wanted to say it's just it's interesting for me and i think it's worth the highlight in that thank you very much are there any further comments okay i propose therefore that committee does not make any recommendations in relation to this negative instrument do um uh does any member disagree no thank you very much our next meeting on the 25th of april we will continue taking formal evidence as part of our inquiry into female participation in sport and physical activity with a session focusing on media coverage as previously trailed and representation of women and girls and sport and that concludes the public part of our meeting today