Female participation in sport and recreation

Journalist’s background: A co-worker of mine has asked if we can canvas our councils to see if anybody has anything else in place similar to that of the City of Vincent.
“Vincent just completed a membership audit of its sporting clubs to find out how many are male and how many are female. On Tuesday, it looks like council will pass a motion to take steps to increase the number of female participants including female participation grants, marketing campaign, gender equality workshops for clubs and a facility audit of all clubs (are they female friendly).”

Please attribute the following quotes to City of South Perth Mayor Sue Doherty.

Can you tell me does council have anything like this in place? Or are there plans to do a similar thing?

The City of South Perth has recently commenced work on development of a Strategic Community Recreation Facilities Plan. As part of this project, the City is including reference to ‘Strategic Directions 6’, the strategic recreation plan developed by the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries (Sport and Recreation WA Branch). This state government plan includes two key strategies aimed at the promotion of female sport by local government, state sporting associations and other stakeholders, namely:

1. Sport and recreation opportunities should be affordable and provide equitable access to encourage participation of people from diverse social, cultural and economic backgrounds; and

2. Sport and recreation organisations must be proactive to increase the contribution that currently underrepresented groups within the community, particularly women, are able to make to the industry.

Does council know the stats of male and female participation in sport in the local area?

Based on current information the City of South Perth is home to 43 local sporting and recreation clubs.

Hockey, athletics and tennis are all strongly represented by females locally, and all three Australian rules football clubs in the City of South Perth have expressed interest in starting female teams in 2019.

The information below provides a current snapshot of membership.

Local clubs snapshot

• 43 clubs (sport and recreation)
• Total memberships: 4,757 (known numbers)
• Male: 3,132 (known numbers)
• Female: 925 (known numbers)

Female dominated sports

• Hockey (52%), Little Athletics (53%)

Sports by playing membership

• Australian rules football: 3 clubs, 950 total members (140 senior, 810 juniors) (22 female, 928 male)
• Hockey: 1 club, 803 total members (332 juniors, 471 seniors) (415 females, 388 males)
• Cricket:  2 clubs, 650 total members (150 senior, 500 junior) (42 female, 608 male)
• Tennis: 3 clubs, 641 total playing membership (427 seniors, 214 juniors) (248 female, 393 male)