"Go home and wash the dishes!"

I promised myself this blog wouldn’t be a rant. But I’d be kidding myself to think everything’s sunshine and lollypops for women in sport. Women's Suffrage Day celebrated its 115th birthday on Friday, and although I’m inclined to celebrate how far women have come, I feel it’s necessary to vocalise the existing backwardness of our supposedly equal society in terms of how women are represented and treated in sport.

In a recent study by the University of California, Santa Cruz, on girls between the age of 12 and 18, it revealed that a whopping 76% had received disparaging comments about their sporting prowess just because they were female, mostly from male peers, teachers, parents and coaches.

From the perspective of an avid sportswoman, having played soccer, touch football, cricket, netball, soccer, athletics and swimming since the age of seven; from a very early age I understood where I stood in the world of sport. And that was always second banana to the boys. I was told in high school that netball, the most played female sport in Australia, was in fact a ‘recreational activity’ and not a sport, whilst our girl’s soccer team would constantly get the lesbian jeers from the boy’s side. I would always vocalise the disparity of the boys Rugby coach when he’d call them “ladies” in training, and ridicule them for weakling “girl throws.” Perhaps if they’d watched a game of the Swifts they’d see these ‘girl throws’ in a completely different light.

However whenever I stepped up to the misogynist PE teacher and the Rugby coach, I would simultaneously be grouped into the “feminist” Germaine Greer set; an otherwise irrational and embittered shrew. I think this backward perspective on those who speak up to the way women are represented in sport has done a lot to overshadow legitimate arguments and gag females from speaking their minds.

Despite all this, I am not saying that women have no representation; we can’t forget the sassy Chief Cricket writer from The Age Chloe Saltau, and the feisty Jacquelin Magnay (pictured below) from the Sydney Morning Herald, who’ve done a lot of remove the ‘shrill’ stigma from women in sport, and given us a layer of legitimacy and pride. But not even strong characters like these are immune from the prejudice, being that Magnay was fronted with the chauvinism of commentator and former AFL player Danny Frawley who told her last year to “to go home and wash the dishes!” Don't hold your breath!