Gender Gaps in Women's Motorsport - includes swearing!
Alrighty folks! Yep, another large gap in posts and another apology due. You may have noticed by now that racing season eats into my personal time quite a lot. For at least two long weekends pretty much every month I'm away, between that I'm working and training pretty much constantly - so the few hours to myself I do get I'm either in bed or sat on the sofa thinking about when I'm going to run out of personal time. It seems like these previous hours are so hard to come by that when I do get them, the last thing I think about doing is blogging - for this I am sorry. Next month I will only be racing locally so I'll finally have plenty of time to relax and talk about all things bi-wheeled. Speaking of which this leads me nicely on to the topic of this weeks post...
Some of you may or may not be aware that we have just come to the end of the 2014 Isle of Man TT
races here. This time of year is special for us Manxies, as the Island comes to life with the smell of burning rubber, burgers and stale ale. You'd be hard pressed to find a local that doesn't love it, and even harder pressed to find one that doesn't appreciate motorsport in some form. Personally, I've grown up around motorsport, from it running in the family, to it being ingrained into both my Irish and Manx upbringing. It's something I've always had an interest in and that interest continues to grow. So until now, I'd just accepted it as it is. The top level of all motorsport, especially motorcycle racing, Formula1 and rally, is ordinarily and widely accepted as being a boys club - with women featuring at a fairly unsubstantial level around the lower rungs of the sport.
Some of you may or may not be aware that we have just come to the end of the 2014 Isle of Man TT races here. This time of year is special for us Manxies, as the Island comes to life with the smell of burning rubber, burgers and stale ale. You'd be hard pressed to find a local that doesn't love it, and even harder pressed to find one that doesn't appreciate motorsport in some form. Personally, I've grown up around motorsport, from it running in the family, to it being ingrained into both my Irish and Manx upbringing. It's something I've always had an interest in and that interest continues to grow. So until now, I'd just accepted it as it is. The top level of all motorsport, especially motorcycle racing, Formula1 and rally, is ordinarily and widely accepted as being a boys club - with women featuring at a fairly unsubstantial level around the lower rungs of the sport.
There are, of course, a few exceptions to these rules with the likes of Maria Costello, Jenny Tinmouth, Molly Taylor and Ana Carrasco to name a few still strongly flying the flag for engine powered females. However, while I don't want to discourage the excellent example these women are setting, these names are few and far between. The top motorsport streams around the world are multi-billion pound profit making machines, with money even footballers couldn't even sniff at being thrown about left-right and centre. So why have we not more women involved at these levels? Unlike cycling, we are not constrained at a physiological level, yet such an inviting career path seems not to interest the wider market of women.
Unlike cycling, motorsport pays well regardless of gender. While some of the worlds top male cyclists are amongst the best paid sportsmen of all time, women of their equal are still required to work, study and contest for their own sponsorship to pay for their 'profession'. Yet in motorsport this separation does not feature, if you're quick you get paid, that's all that matters. I see this as a wonderful thing. In cycling, we have to put in the same, if not more, work to reach the top - without much of a profit to gain. In motorsport, we could work as hard as our peers and reap the benefits, a shining example to all sports in which women suffer the consequence of their gender. That's not to say we're after the dollars, but those of us that deserve it..well...really fucking deserve it.
Yet my query still remains...where are all these women? Lets revisit my earlier statement on physiological constraints. Lets face it, women (for the most part) are different from guys. We're built to carry babies, hold the fort, our muscle fibres are different, our fat stores work differently. Thus, the way we carry out physical activity differs greatly from the way men do it. That's not to say we're lesser, obviously, but unfortunately history has not served these differences well. In motorsport, especially the likes of rally and lighter motorcycle racing - we aren't bound to these alternate functions. We multitask. We're programmed not to make irrational, risky decisions. Academically and cognitively there are almost no differences between the sexes. We're more mentally stable. The list goes on...all of these could, and should, benefit activities that involve highly pressured situations such as motorsport.
So what's holding us back? Unfortunately, while we as females sport an impressive list of positive traits for all things motorsport, there is an equally long list of traits which, in theory, could prevent us from even entering into a high-pressure, high-risk profession. We don't like risk taking, as the childbearers of our race we're duty bound to hold it together. We're not so great at aggression (though I'd suggest to scientists they try doing some women's cycle racing...I beg to disagree), due to our lack of testosterone. As such, we're capable of more sympathy, empathy and general emotion which may or may not hold us back from riding elbow to elbow with another human at 150+mph, that said, even if we did - genetically speaking we'd probably be pretty badly affected if we were to see an nasty off.
Scientific differences aside - our brains and bodies are actually pretty well equipped for motorsport. We're lighter, we're clever, we've better spatial awareness and memory and we're generally safer to be around. So what's my theory on it?...
I was warned by a few the other day, when suggesting a post on gender gaps in motorsport, to be wary of comparing it to cycling. I'm going to throw that advice right out of the window here and directly compare the two and say that the reason there are sod all women in top level women in motorsport is the exactly the same reason that there were almost no women in top level cycling before the 1970's. I direct your attention to the existence of a woman named Alfonsina Strada - the only women to have completed the Giro D'Italia, back in 1924. Not only did she finish but she finished ahead of men, a lot of whom couldn't cut the mustard and DNF'd the race entirely. She was met, for a brief spell, with substantial media attention and public adoration as a heroine who could change the face of sport for the then pretty well suppressed woman. This didn't last. The performing monkey that was the face of 'women's cycling' was shunned no more than a year later, when she was essentially told that her previous attempt was a one-off for the good of publicity.
So how is that comparable to now? Well, as we all know now, women's cycling - since around the 1980's has been undergoing periods of drastic change - most recently being the most significant. Since the 2012 Olympics women's professional cycling has been conquering every aspect of the sport at a fair old rate of knots. The reason for these changes is because of cultural changes, nothing more and nothing less. It's culture that prevented women's cycling from flourishing, male representatives of the sport dismissing the top level athletes due to archaic notions that they're not quick enough and don't provide entertainment value. It's all well and good (it's really not, that's sarcasm) when you have one or two women feature in a male dominated sport - these are the performing monkeys of their profession. But, when you have an army of determined athletes knocking down the doors of officials to ensure their futures are sealed with equality...well, that's when shit gets serious.
So why is this culture still prevalent in motorsport? Just as the electric motorcycles built by geniuses can change. It can improve. What we need is something big, something like the Olympics, something that made all those women think "huh, I could really do bloody well at this". The more women that wake up and realise they're no different, that they're capable,
with top speeds of 170mph are still laughed at by spectators in the TT, as are women with aspirations of podium spots. They're still met with the "there there dear" attitude of post war gentry. It's not our minds that stop us from doing well, its the culture that's been enforced upon us. We've been tricked into believing we're just not good enough to compete with the men. Just as we were in cycling, and football and countless other sports, hell we were even tricked into believing we weren't worthy of voting once. So with this I bring good news - just as it has been with cycling, women's motorsport
that they're quick - the better.
I fucking love motorsport, as I do cycling, and I'm female. There's nothing weird about that. The next person to smirk at my talk of cylinders, sprockets, speeds or records...you take a long look in your mirror and ask yourself exactly what it is that makes you such a damn expert.
If you want to do something, for fucks sake let gender be the last thing that gets in your way.
If you want proof, here's proof enough; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mich%C3%A8le_Mouton
Unlike cycling, motorsport pays well regardless of gender. While some of the worlds top male cyclists are amongst the best paid sportsmen of all time, women of their equal are still required to work, study and contest for their own sponsorship to pay for their 'profession'. Yet in motorsport this separation does not feature, if you're quick you get paid, that's all that matters. I see this as a wonderful thing. In cycling, we have to put in the same, if not more, work to reach the top - without much of a profit to gain. In motorsport, we could work as hard as our peers and reap the benefits, a shining example to all sports in which women suffer the consequence of their gender. That's not to say we're after the dollars, but those of us that deserve it..well...really fucking deserve it.
Yet my query still remains...where are all these women? Lets revisit my earlier statement on physiological constraints. Lets face it, women (for the most part) are different from guys. We're built to carry babies, hold the fort, our muscle fibres are different, our fat stores work differently. Thus, the way we carry out physical activity differs greatly from the way men do it. That's not to say we're lesser, obviously, but unfortunately history has not served these differences well. In motorsport, especially the likes of rally and lighter motorcycle racing - we aren't bound to these alternate functions. We multitask. We're programmed not to make irrational, risky decisions. Academically and cognitively there are almost no differences between the sexes. We're more mentally stable. The list goes on...all of these could, and should, benefit activities that involve highly pressured situations such as motorsport.
Scientific differences aside - our brains and bodies are actually pretty well equipped for motorsport. We're lighter, we're clever, we've better spatial awareness and memory and we're generally safer to be around. So what's my theory on it?...
I was warned by a few the other day, when suggesting a post on gender gaps in motorsport, to be wary of comparing it to cycling. I'm going to throw that advice right out of the window here and directly compare the two and say that the reason there are sod all women in top level women in motorsport is the exactly the same reason that there were almost no women in top level cycling before the 1970's. I direct your attention to the existence of a woman named Alfonsina Strada - the only women to have completed the Giro D'Italia, back in 1924. Not only did she finish but she finished ahead of men, a lot of whom couldn't cut the mustard and DNF'd the race entirely. She was met, for a brief spell, with substantial media attention and public adoration as a heroine who could change the face of sport for the then pretty well suppressed woman. This didn't last. The performing monkey that was the face of 'women's cycling' was shunned no more than a year later, when she was essentially told that her previous attempt was a one-off for the good of publicity.
So how is that comparable to now? Well, as we all know now, women's cycling - since around the 1980's has been undergoing periods of drastic change - most recently being the most significant. Since the 2012 Olympics women's professional cycling has been conquering every aspect of the sport at a fair old rate of knots. The reason for these changes is because of cultural changes, nothing more and nothing less. It's culture that prevented women's cycling from flourishing, male representatives of the sport dismissing the top level athletes due to archaic notions that they're not quick enough and don't provide entertainment value. It's all well and good (it's really not, that's sarcasm) when you have one or two women feature in a male dominated sport - these are the performing monkeys of their profession. But, when you have an army of determined athletes knocking down the doors of officials to ensure their futures are sealed with equality...well, that's when shit gets serious.
So why is this culture still prevalent in motorsport? Just as the electric motorcycles built by geniuses can change. It can improve. What we need is something big, something like the Olympics, something that made all those women think "huh, I could really do bloody well at this". The more women that wake up and realise they're no different, that they're capable,with top speeds of 170mph are still laughed at by spectators in the TT, as are women with aspirations of podium spots. They're still met with the "there there dear" attitude of post war gentry. It's not our minds that stop us from doing well, its the culture that's been enforced upon us. We've been tricked into believing we're just not good enough to compete with the men. Just as we were in cycling, and football and countless other sports, hell we were even tricked into believing we weren't worthy of voting once. So with this I bring good news - just as it has been with cycling, women's motorsport
that they're quick - the better.
I fucking love motorsport, as I do cycling, and I'm female. There's nothing weird about that. The next person to smirk at my talk of cylinders, sprockets, speeds or records...you take a long look in your mirror and ask yourself exactly what it is that makes you such a damn expert.
If you want to do something, for fucks sake let gender be the last thing that gets in your way.
If you want proof, here's proof enough; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mich%C3%A8le_Mouton
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