Canadian team makeup reflects gender gap in Winter Paralympic Games

A gaping gender gap in Winter Paralympic Games continues with Canada’s team reflecting that imbalance.
A gaping gender gap in Winter Paralympic Games continues with Canada’s team reflecting that imbalance.
The International Paralympic Committee trumpeted a document variety of girls competing in Beijing, however 138 nonetheless represents simply 24 per cent of 564 worldwide athletes.
By comparability, 45 per cent of athletes competing in Beijing’s Winter Olympics have been girls.
Canada’s Paralympic team of 48, together with guides, options 13 girls for 27 per cent.
There have been initially 14 girls on the team, however a skier withdrew from girls’s alpine racing due to damage.
Beijing’s 10-day Paralympic Games opened Friday and shut March 13.
Gender disparity wasn’t as pronounced in final summer season’s Tokyo Paralympics with 42 per cent of taking part athletes feminine.
Over half of Canada’s 128 athletes in Tokyo have been girls with 71 accounting for 55 per cent of the team.
That’s due in half to Canada qualifying in three girls’s team sports activities.
The elephant in the Winter Paralympic Games room is Para hockey, which was beforehand known as sledge hockey. It’s the one large-team sport and it is male.
“There’s no query that the team sport and the team sport skewing is form of a primary form of problem,” Canadian Paralympic Committee president Karen O’Neill advised The Canadian Press from Beijing.
The IPC slapped a “combined” label on Para hockey earlier than the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C.
But solely three girls — two Norwegians and one Chinese — have ever been on a Paralympic Games roster.
The host nation’s Jing Yu is the lone lady on a Para hockey team in Beijing. Rosters are 17 gamers, however international locations can carry an 18th if that participant is a lady.
Canada is certainly one of few international locations alongside the United States and Britain with established nationwide girls’s Para hockey groups.
Women eager to play Para hockey at its highest degree — the Paralympic Games is their Stanley Cup — at present should make a male roster.
“That’s what’s being advised to women and girls world wide is ‘OK, let’s have a look at you crack these prime rosters and get there as a result of that is your solely choice,'” stated Tara Chisholm, who coaches the Canadian girls’s para hockey team.
“I do know our girls who’re watching the Paralympic Games this week are wishing they’d the identical alternatives that these males that they play with again dwelling on their membership groups are having this week.”
While a girls’s world Para hockey problem is scheduled for this summer season, extra taking part international locations are wanted for a reputable world championship and thus entry into the Paralympic Games.
Chisholm would not anticipate the latter to occur in time for the 2026 Winter Games in Milan and Cortina, Italy, with 2030 the higher wager.
Andrea Bundon, an affiliate professor on the University of British Columbia, research the Paralympic Games gender gap due to her expertise guiding visually-impaired Para-Nordic skiers Courtney Knight (2010) in Whistler and Margarita Gorbounova (2014) in Sochi, Russia.
“They had a powerful desire for a feminine information,” Bundon stated. “Many of the guides are males. The motive being is it is form of simpler to discover a man who is quicker than you than to discover a lady who is quicker than you, however not herself racing.
“I consider I used to be certainly one of two feminine guides in Sochi. We’re lining up in the beginning line, and regardless of this being a girls’s occasion, there’s lots of males on the beginning line.
“That bought us trying round extra typically at who’s on the Games? Why are we seeing so few girls as athletes, as coaches, managers, wax technicians. Where are the ladies?”
There are 39 medal occasions for males, 35 for ladies and 4 combined occasions in Beijing’s Paralympic Games.
Introducing combined gender occasions like relays would not essentially enhance the variety of girls taking part, Bundon stated.
“They create steadiness in the variety of medals out there to women and men, however they do not create any extra spots on the team,” she defined. “You’re utilizing athletes which might be already there. You have the identical feminine athlete with yet one more race.
“It would not create incentive for the nations to develop extra pathways for ladies or to assist extra girls.”
Domestically, the CPC runs a recruitment mix referred to as Paralympian Search, much like the Canadian Olympic Committee’s Training Ground, in which athletes from throughout the nation are put by means of energy, velocity and endurance exams to match them with a sport.
“We realized many ladies and younger ladies have been simply not popping out,” O’Neill stated.
A girls’s pilot undertaking in 2021, which was digital due to the COVID-19 pandemic, drew over 30 functions, she stated.
“Because of the expertise from that, and the numbers, we knew that we have to pursue this,” O’Neill stated.
The IPC dedicated nearly 20 years in the past to a objective of 30 per cent girls in management positions.
“They’re nonetheless not even near that,” Bundon stated.
O’Neill says there may be extra gender parity in technical roles similar to teaching on the summer season aspect than winter, however extra work needs to be finished on that entrance general.
“When we take a look at the info and we take a look at among the obstacles, cultural and societal got here up throughout the prime three nonetheless,” she stated.
O’Neill believes a profitable Vancouver bid for the 2030 Winter Games would give Canada a job in accelerating girls in the Winter Paralympic motion, notably if girls’s Para hockey is on the menu.
“I believe one thing as targeted because the 2030 bid to carry and shine a light-weight on girls in Paralympic sport, hosted by Canada, could be an unimaginable incentive to additional shut that gap, and use the runway of the following eight years to speculate in the technical, the participation in some focused areas, that I believe would increase the bar and set a brand new customary,” she stated.
This report by The Canadian Press was first printed March 6, 2022.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press

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