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The Laura Dowling Experience
Scoring Equal Opportunity: Closing the Gender Gap in Sport
Niamh Tallon, founder of Her Sport, is on a mission to change how we see women in sport through media coverage, education, and challenging the gender gap that exists across all levels of sport.
• One in five girls drop out of sport between primary and secondary school compared to one in twenty boys
• 94% of women in executive managerial positions have a background in sport, showing the professional benefits of athletic participation
• Body image concerns, period stigma, and lack of appropriate facilities are major barriers for female athletes
• Female athletes face disproportionate focus on their appearance rather than their performance in media coverage
• Her Sport has featured over 900 different female athletes, creating visibility and representation across all sports
• Women's teams at all levels frequently receive less resources, poorer facilities, and fewer opportunities than male counterparts
• The Her Sport Foundation provides workshops, grants, and advocacy to support female athletes from grassroots to high performance
Our vision is equal opportunity in sport, regardless of gender. Support female athletes by following Her Sport, joining our MVP platform, or getting in touch at hello@hersport.ie.
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My sister played competitive soccer for years. She was on the Irish team and loved it, and she said that she turned up at a match one day and the boys not men, the boys were playing a friendly match and they had access to the changing rooms and the women who were turning up for their competitive match didn't, and Rachel had to use like a urinal type thing and pee in the car. That's just unacceptable, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It's really common. Adult women's teams being deprioritised for junior boys teams happens across the country a lot. We have a super champion for her sport. She's like 14 years old. She was telling me how their team showed up for a competitive match and were going to use the main pitch in their club and the boys of the same age group showed up for training and the girls team was asked to go out onto the back pitch to teach them who's more straight away. If the club isn't treating me properly, if the coaches aren't treating me properly, if we're not getting coaches, if we're not getting facilities, I'm paying my membership the same as jim over there is paying his membership and we get 10 of the resource that they get welcome back to the laura down Experience podcast, where each week, I bring you insightful and inspiring guests that will open your mind and empower your life.
Speaker 1:Today's guest is on a mission to change how we see women in sport, and she's doing it one headline, highlight reel and hard-hitting stat at a time. Niamh Tallon is the founder of Hersportie, ireland's leading media platform dedicated to championing female athletes and challenging the gender gap in sport. This is an amazing podcast and it will really open your eyes, and it is for anyone who has a little girl, a teenage girl, or loves women and wants to see them progress in sport and the impact that actually competing in sport has on girls' and women's lives Enjoy. Before we get into today's episode, I would love to ask you for a little favour. If you like this podcast and I know so many of you do you could really help me out by giving it a nice rating, sharing it with your friends and subscribing to the podcast. It may not seem like a big deal, but actually this really helps to keep the podcast high up in the charts, and that means that I can keep bringing you brilliant guests who are insightful, inspiring and full of wisdom that we can all learn from. Thanks a million. Now let's get to it. Are you feeling wired by day and restless at night? Well, fabio Orno, relax is your daily blend of botanicals, b vitamins and magnesium to help you feel calm and balanced, ease into deep rest and wake up refreshed. Check out our amazing reviews on fabiowellnesscom. Available on fabiowellnesscom and in pharmacies and health food stores nationwide.
Speaker 1:This episode was produced by podcutteditingcom. Check them out at podcutteditingcom. Tell them Laura Dowling sent you, and they might even do your first podcast free of charge. And do your first podcast free of charge. It's so important that our girls have. They see women and they see other girls, and they think I can do that too. And it is it's the under-representation, the chronic under-representation, that is the issue. So, niamh, tell us how you get into all this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a couple of years ago, around the time of the 2016 Olympics, I realised, like the lack of visibility and media coverage that there were for female athletes and at the time there was, you know, a couple of comparisons that we had from an Irish perspective and an international perspective that you could just notice the gap that was there and notice that the female athletes weren't getting the coverage, and it just, I suppose, sparked a bit of a curiosity in myself and I was looking around at like my own peers and I was still involved in sport at the time, looking around at how many of my own friends had walked away from sport, recalling when I started university that, like very few girls and women are like surrounding me were involved in sports still as well, there was like one other girl in my year of 260 plus students that was interested in sport in the same way that I was and like and got it, and others just weren't really as as engaged.
Speaker 2:So those things like started to interest me and and I wanted to explore and I knew the benefits of sport could be and I love competing and meeting people and I just there's like opportunity to travel and I just thought like sport was brilliant and it just shaped so much of me and like who I am and I just didn't really get it. I just didn't really understand why more women weren't involved.
Speaker 1:I actually did a podcast with Gary Lavin, who's the founder of Vitiate, and he was saying apparently 80% of the women on the 94, 94% that are heads of companies yeah, I listened to that one, did you or competitive sports women as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's 94% of women in executive managerial positions have a background in sport. So it's not necessarily that you have to be the best of the best in sport, but you're gaining all of these skills on the pitch, in the pool, that you will apply to your life.
Speaker 1:So, whether that is teamwork, whether that's resilience, whether that's leadership, whether that's leadership, there's so many things that you're gaining that's failing, and failing and failing and still turning up to get into the pool the next day and think about it from the trajectory of like women in leadership positions that have a background in sport.
Speaker 2:So they went for a promotion, probably didn't get it, went for a promotion again, mightn't have gotten it, went again, finally got it. But they keep putting their name in the hat again and again and again they'll go in, they'll negotiate salaries, they'll address their weaknesses and they'll take it as you know something that they need to improve and reflect on their I suppose internal and personal performance and see how they will want to compete to improve. We want to compete to go for particular positions. That's how some of those women are getting to those positions and why they have a background in sport where, if you're not learning all of those skills, you go for a promotion. You don't get it, like, oh, I'm not good enough, I don't know how to fix it, so I'm just going to stay at this level, like there. That's obviously a very, I suppose, stark contrast, but that generally can be happening.
Speaker 1:You're learning skills constantly, yeah, all the time, by competing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a bit of a thing around competitiveness in women that I think sometimes can be like frowned upon and we're told that we shouldn't be competitive and maybe it's not that ladylike and like all that kind of stuff. And I completely agree. I think competitiveness in women should be celebrated, should be encouraged. You know, we started off sometimes with like girls and telling them not to be putting themselves forward, not to be backing themselves, which is holding them back and is a negative thing, I think. So I think we need to talk about that in a more positive light.
Speaker 1:Competitive doesn't mean you're elbowing other women out of the way, because everyone comes along with you on the ride as well, and but you can be pushing each other. Yeah, I want to be better, yeah but that's what team sports does you're pushing each other to be better.
Speaker 2:So in a company team that can happen as well, but you want to be surrounded and that's something that we see in our, in our own environment is like listening to other people that are in different workplaces like I'm trying to learn from people, like how to set up that right culture within our organization, where you want to be challenged, you want to be learning, you want to be, you know, put forward, to be a better you, and that's what sports does and that's what it teaches people to do. But we're seeing so many girls and women drop out of sports that they're missing out on all of these opportunities. So the current statistic is that one in five girls are dropping out of sport between primary and secondary school, versus one in 20 boys. So four times as many girls are dropping out as boys. Do we know the reason for that?
Speaker 2:There's a whole multitude of reasons. It is a transition between primary and secondary school, obviously going in and having more subjects and homework and like figuring all of that kind of stuff out. It can be attitudes and culture. Sometimes in school it can be the. There can be kind of a push for boys to keep doing sport and an encouragement for them to keep doing sport. It's, it's normalized. There can be less of it, like we have heard in sometimes in girls schools, where it is discouraged, can be less of it, like we have heard in sometimes in girls schools, where it is discouraged. Then, looking at from a puberty perspective, like they are going through different changes in their body. They are getting a menstrual cycle, having periods, hair on their legs, hair under their arms, like all of these kind of things that they could be self-conscious about. And oh, I never thought of the hair on the legs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've heard of girls that will not go training because they haven't shaved their legs oh genuinely, and there's adult women that won't go to the gym if they haven't shaved under their arms, like all of that kind of stuff it's a whole part of the body hair aspect.
Speaker 2:Isn't that good, yeah think swimming as well, oh, yeah, yeah. So if people are swimming, ballet, dancing, like different things, and if they're like worried about their kind of pubic area as well, like that can be something that they're concerned about and worried about. So hair on men's and boys bodies is like yes, obviously, as boys are becoming teenage boys, like I'm sure that they're a little self-conscious about it too, but it's considered normal.
Speaker 1:They're kind of probably divided because they're a bit hairier and they look more like a man. Yeah, it's just more normal.
Speaker 2:And we have this like it's a Western thing that women should be hairless.
Speaker 1:I know, from top to toe, vibe right down literally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, women should be hairless, like I know, from top to toe. Yeah, yeah, it's terrible. So there is that and I'd say, like each to their own, but it shouldn't be something that stops you from like, if you haven't shaved your legs, from going training, or shaved under your arms or whatever. It is like it's we, through kind of workshops that we do in schools, like tell them this is normal. It's like there's I think it's a whole thing, kind of from Gillette, that they just wanted to market to, you know, their whole population. So it wasn't just razors for men. They were like oh yeah, let's tell women they should shave their legs, and then we can sell razors to women as well.
Speaker 1:So do you remember the uproar when Julia Roberts went to the Oscars and she was wearing that dress and she was waving at the crowd and she had a hairy armpit? There was the newspaper articles devoted to it.
Speaker 2:And we can't say that it's not a thing like I have within, like my own writing group, there was somebody on the cover of a magazine a few years ago who doesn't shave and they were just kind of negatively discussing it and I was like no one's telling you you don't have to shave under your arms. If you want to shave under your arms or whatever, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that we should be judging other people for not like it's. It is a completely normal thing and that's what we need to make girls and women feel like it is and not that like because, like I remember, like I had friends that were a couple years older than me and they had started shaving their legs and stuff and I was like talk to my mom, it's like I need to like shave my legs and stuff.
Speaker 2:She's like you're too young, you're too young, you're too young, and I'm sure there's a lot of that in households where parents are like, no, you don't need to. But the girls are starting to get self-conscious as well, or they don't know how to broach those conversations as well, as they kind of go through changing bodies and that. So, um, that's something that is is topical there, and I suppose changing shape and looking at the different sports and how to manage having a period the squirts has raised its ugly head again.
Speaker 2:It's all over the newspapers this weekend Do you want to just briefly explain what that's about In terms of skorts. It's interesting. It gets a lot more conversation in camogie than it does in a sport like hockey.
Speaker 1:Just explain what a skort is first of all for people to understand.
Speaker 2:It's a mix between shorts and skorts, so it's a skirt with shorts on underneath it, and it's been traditionally worn in camogie. It's you're obligated to wear it in camogie. It would be the uniform for women hockey as well, and a couple of other sports that would be. But in Ireland a lot of discussion is had around around camogie. There was a vote last year looking to. I believe it was to make it optional that you could wear shorts or a skort. That you didn't, you weren't obliged to wear a skort, and what's the skort supposed to signify?
Speaker 1:Is it just that? It's just the uniform for girls? Yeah, I think it's been tradition. It doesn't help with periods or anything.
Speaker 2:No, it's just been the traditional uniform and it wasn't a vote actually by the players. Last year it was a vote by other, I suppose, powers by all the men on the board. I won't say that it's by all the men, by all the men on the board. I won't say that it's by all the men. I can't remember whether it was the county boards or who exactly was going forward for the vote, but it wasn't the current athletes.
Speaker 2:There are women involved in whether it's county boards or in the Quoggy Association or whatever different roles that people filter up into that system, that do believe that that should be the uniform and it's traditional and it's women. There are women of a certain vintage that maybe still believe that I wouldn't want to just stereotype that it's all the men that are doing that. I don't believe that is is so, but the current generation, they don't want it, and Kilkenny and Dublin showed up all wearing shorts to make a stand because they did research. The Gaelic Players Association, which be known as the GPA, did research in the last couple of weeks that resulted in this, again demonstrating that the players don't want to wear skorts and that they find them uncomfortable, and some of them are self-conscious about their periods. Some skorts depending can be quite short and they wanted to move towards the option of having shorts and the match that was happening yesterday they were all sent back inside to change into skorts or the match wouldn't go ahead. So it's not listening to the players, it's not listening to what they want.
Speaker 2:Personally, like I've had conversations about this, there are people that do want to wear them, or quite happy to wear them. I played hockey, I played camogie. I was quite comfortable in a squirt. It didn't bother me. But if it does bother somebody else and they want to wear shorts, I think they should be entitled to do so. There's also you have dual players that are playing Gaelic football and they're playing camogie for the same club and if they accidentally pack the wrong kit so if they accidentally pack their shorts instead of their scores when they're going to a camogie match, they can be not allowed to play the other team could put in a complaint against them and that could ensure that that player is is ineligible to play. And it's just something so minor when we should be really just focusing on the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a bit like wimbledon and the white skirts, yeah as well. Yeah, that is yeah, and they can find it difficult with the periods too and with the gea shorts. So I had a lady on my podcast, margaret waltz physical, and my podcast with her went viral because she was talking about how the GAA shorts are actually made for men. They don't take into account women's bodies. The hips go out, the waist goes in, the arse might get a bit bigger and girls are picking the shorts out of their bottom on the pitch because they're made for men.
Speaker 1:And women aren't small men. We've a completely different shape. Yeah, so, even at that, even though girls say that the skorts are uncomfortable, they're still wearing shorts that are potentially made for men's bodies, not women's bodies. Yeah, no you definitely see that.
Speaker 2:You also see it with jerseys.
Speaker 2:So jerseys can be quite a straight fit which doesn't necessarily suit, again, the female body shape and it can kind of be a bit clingy and can make people a little bit uncomfortable and self-conscious and just not really flattering sometimes to the shape of a female body. Which then opens up a whole other dialogue around women's bodies when they're players, when they're athletes, and there's enough conversation about female athletes and women's bodies generally that you know we do need to be giving them the right kit to wear that suits their suits, their body types and makes them feel comfortable, and not opening players up to more dialogue about like it's it's a lot more common in women's sports for women's bodies to be discussed and objectified and talk about how they look and what shape they are and all of this than it is in men's sport. Like there's research that's been done that you know shows the type of conversation about female athletes versus the type of conversation about male athletes. Like it's a lot more performance, competition based when it comes to male athletes than it is.
Speaker 1:It's a lot more about the looks and I saw a funny reel that you put up where men that were so male athletes were being asked the same questions that female athletes were being asked and the men were just like gobsmacked they can't even answer and they start laughing things like oh so you're looking really lovely in your kit today. Can you explain where you got it from? They're literally like what? Or someone saying oh so when are you getting married to your girlfriend? The lads the lads are like sorry, what kind of question is that? Yeah, nothing. They're the kinds of questions that are asked of the female athletes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot of discourse around, like even coming back after having had a baby, and I believe it was Naomi Osaka. There was a lot of kind of conversation about like performance and body shape and like how heavy you are now, like those are kind of things that are discussed, and I think she had a Barbie doll as well and they were like, oh, do you carry your Barbie doll around in your bag with you everywhere? And she's like no, it's at home, like it's deadly that she has a Barbie doll of her, but like she's not a child, like yeah, she doesn't need to carry like it's.
Speaker 1:So she had a Barbie doll made of her.
Speaker 2:Like her, yes, a couple of different female athlete Barbies, which is great to see the inclusivity and the representation of of different female athletes and stuff and that's like a great opportunity for the different athletes to be recognized and for little girls and boys to be able to buy those dolls and to have Naomi.
Speaker 2:I know Billie Jean King had one a number of years ago. I don't know if it's available for sale or if they did like a once off, but like amazing that it's just showing a bit like Barbie have put in, I think, a good effort over the last couple years to have more inclusive Barbie dolls like. I know they've done different ones with disability and like wheelchairs and like all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's, it's some of the conversation I think that is had with female athletes is like less about the performance, more about like it's not more personal, it's a lot more about their personal lives. But when it comes to weight, like, I've seen stuff that comes up talking about like movies and people say about like, say, bridget Jones or something, and they're like oh, she's meant to be like this mass and whatever, and it's like she's just not like oh yeah, like she was massive, but she was a size 12.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is what most of us are. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're like asking Victoria, like how have you they made her get on the scales? Well, or ask, and I don't know if she did.
Speaker 1:in the end she did. She got on the scales.
Speaker 2:Chris Evans asked her and they did it with one of the other Spice girls as well, and it's like who decided that that was okay as a conversation to be at or a question to have after a woman has just grown a child that was years ago.
Speaker 1:I wonder, would they do that now?
Speaker 2:I don't think they would.
Speaker 1:I think it's too risky now. But even with the whole body, the look and that as well, like those you know, the relating, the Irish relating that competed in the Olympics, like they are gorgeous women, they're beautiful, like they just look beautiful. But a lot of the commentary was on how they looked and they performed well also, but was on how they looked. No, they performed well also, but it was interesting that we don't really comment on men that way when it comes to sports.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not as common. I won't say that people don't comment on how male athletes look.
Speaker 1:Well, I know that there was, wasn't there a French gymnast and he was going over the bar and his todger got knocked and there was like a slow-mo viral reel going on.
Speaker 2:It was actually so funny in terms of like female athletes. It's discussed a lot more in terms of how they look than male athletes, but I think we also have to be truthful. You know there's a lot of people that are like, oh, the rugby players are so handsome.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2:So we can pretend like it doesn't go both ways. No, but I think that might be more within friend groups and stuff than it is commentary on media platforms or around say, they've just competed in the Olympic Games, they've just gotten a fourth place, and this kind of thing. And if it is that discussion instantly about that, where people are entitled, I suppose, to titles, I suppose to have crushes here and there, of course it shouldn't be the majority of the conversation, like these athletes work really really really hard to go out to represent their country or their county or you know whatever level that they're playing at and we need to respect them for their athletic ability and capability and make sure we're not just focusing on the wrong things sometimes, because there can be a lot of that sometimes.
Speaker 1:So, getting back to the little girls and you going into schools, talking to them about body them, about periods that transition between primary and secondary school, where they're one in five is dropping out, yeah, and then, as that gets into secondary school, I'm assuming more drop out then yeah, yeah, so one in.
Speaker 2:Two girls drop out of sport by the age of 20.
Speaker 1:One in who.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow. So if we're talking about that statistic that we mentioned earlier, that 94% of women in executive managerial positions have a background in sport, but one in two girls have dropped out of sport by 20, there's a huge impact that that will have on their life. So there's personal development, professional development, like we've mentioned that statistic already, in terms of like from a professional capacity, a sense of community network, confidence, thinking about women's bodies and the importance of exercise, and actually would a female athlete?
Speaker 1:is her body more important from a performance point of view than from a looks point of view? For female athletes, so would that should be? Would it be? Would that be too generalist? But one would hope that a female athlete sees her body as a tool to get the gold or do whatever she wants, whereas other women may just see their bodies as something that needs to look a certain way, to look good, rather than perform good.
Speaker 2:I've certainly heard a number of female athletes talk about the power that their body can have and training it for it for performance, and what it can do in the pitch or in the pool or on the track. There is a prevalence of body image issues in sport as well, and there are certain sports that have more eating disorders than others. But in terms of, I suppose the conversation that we're trying to have more at like, your club and grassroot level that encapsulates the whole kind of female population is to look at how your club and grassroot level that encapsulates the whole kind of female population is to look at how your body can perform like what? Like? When we're talking to teenage girls, it's not about how you look now like that's not the narrative that we want to have. It's like what will your body do for you when you're 40, 50, 60, 70? Like? Do you want to worry you know, if you're 60 and 70 and you fall over about breaking your hip or breaking your elbow, knowing that women are more susceptible to osteoporosis than men?
Speaker 1:Are you having those conversations with teenage girls? Yeah, oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, they need to know, are they 100%?
Speaker 2:And like I remember speaking to somebody in my kind of mid-20s we just kind of started her sport and she was talking about paying into your bone density to kind of like your mid-20s and I was thinking I was like, oh my god, I'm that age. Like, have I? Have I put enough calcium into my body? Thank god I used to drink so much milk because I think I have it under control. But it is having those conversations and making sure that, like, as girls bodies change into a woman's body, the shape does change and girls can feel self-conscious about if they are getting breasts or if they are getting hips, and obviously everybody's different as well, and it's happening at different stages. So someone might develop at 12 and 13 and then someone else might not until they're 15, and it's trying to make sure that they're not. I didn't have a pair of boots until I was 17.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how did you feel about it? Oh, my god, I was called Mulvaney Two Backs. I've said this before Mulvaney's my maiden name Mulvaney Two Backs. I've said this before Mulvaney's my maiden name Mulvaney Two Backs. The bitches I went to school with, but yeah, just really just yeah. But they came eventually. Yeah, that's fine, but I'm happy with them. I love them even more.
Speaker 2:Now, after having my babies and the fact that I'm older, I give a less of a shit but, yeah, you need to go through, yeah, like those kind of few years to like be comfortable at your body, be confident your body. So we're trying to have those conversations now and I suppose it's not to have what you're talking about, that thought process towards, like, aesthetically, how you look and if people are changing shape and they're not, as I suppose you know, straight and slim as they were when they were 11, like that's just not how you're going to be, and it's making sure that people aren't under eating and ensuring that they're not thinking of, like, what they look like now and considering the longevity of their life and what they're going to ask of their bodies. And making sure that you have to put enough food in to perform, like we talk about performing in sport and all of the activities that you're doing and lots of kids are involved in lots of different sports teams. There needs to be enough food going in and also to perform in school and like that your cognitive function works. So it's all of these types of things.
Speaker 2:Like there's a whole thing with growing boys and like, oh, you should have a second plate of dinner there. You're a growing young man, you need to eat up. We don't say that to girls and you could have a boy and a girl at the same age and the girl could be doing more sport and have more exercise and output of calories happening and we can almost be like discouraging them to eat more sometimes and encouraging the boy who could be doing way less exercise when they need it. Like they're growing and they have. Like what is the output? You need to be looking at, how much exercise and training are they doing, as well as the growing and all of the like, just baseline of food that needs to be going in. So having those conversations I think is important to ensure that we have a generation of, you know, strong young women coming up and I've heard some really scary stories Young girls seeing stuff on TikTok where they think they should only be eating like 600, 800 calories a day which is just like not going to sustain anybody.
Speaker 2:No, but kids that are like doing a hell of a lot of sport and it's just, it's not going to work and they're going to end up in a bad situation, even just their bones.
Speaker 1:Everything will be everything, and actually girls that had eating disorders in their teens or that didn't eat certain foods, etc. They're at more risk of osteoporosis than as they get when they're older.
Speaker 2:Because they did start, they starved their bodies when it was really important to actually, and that's why we're trying to have those conversations now is to look at your like you have one body. It's like, how are you going to look after it? So yeah, that's something that's really important for us when we are having those conversations and also having like a truthful conversation about media, about social media, about magazines, tv movies, like Like we have this. It's fascinating when you watch TV and how, like, everyone kind of looks the same and they're all the same. I need to go and just sit, like you know, at a park or something and everybody's all different shapes and sizes and we need to reflect that more.
Speaker 2:And I think what I would talk about when it comes to, maybe, social media is it was all fun and games when we had dog years on snapchat and all these different filters and deadly. I mean. Technology is is cool and it's great to see the things that it can do, but when we're talking about, I suppose, how that has evolved is the filters now on all the platforms where you're changing how high your cheekbones are or are your lips fuller. I've had apps on tiktok advertised to me and it's like make your waist smaller, make your breasts fuller and all this, and they can actually do that in video format too, so it isn't just a still picture.
Speaker 2:That was what like really concerned me. Like a few years ago it was a video editing app and I was just like thank God I'm old enough and like comfortable enough and what I look like to not consider using that. But that comfortable enough and what I look like to not consider using that. But that is a scary prospect for young teens and adult women to be seeing those things and to have that pressure that they need to look a certain way and they're going to start editing themselves and then look in the mirror or walk past a window and not be comfortable and confident in who they are. So that's what actually really bothers me and like I have friends that won't take photographs without filters on them Beautiful people that won't and I've been in the photographs and I'm like that's not my face, eyes half closed, but it's like, oh sorry, they're filtering your face then too.
Speaker 2:No, it's to say like you're taking a photograph on Snapchat or on Instagram is already there and it's like I'm like they're not my cheeks, that's not my, they're not my lips. That's way too pretty.
Speaker 1:I don't look like that, but it's not. No, it's not that, it's not.
Speaker 2:Even I don't look like myself and I don't, I don't want like. Sometimes I'm like I look like an alien, like yeah you can spot it sometimes a little bit of lighting or whatever.
Speaker 2:I horrendous. Like I know there's, you know, certain settings on phones that can, you know, enhance things like kind of naturally. But I don't we shouldn't be looking to change the shape of our face or our bodies. Like we have to be comfortable and confident in who we are and it's a scary, just prospect of the pressure that we're putting Like it's like back to touching up photos and stuff for covers and magazines and getting rid of blemishes and getting rid of cellulite and like all of these different things. Like that's the reality. So let's reflect that for girls and women and boys and men, that like what the reality and the truth of what people looks like, so that we can embrace, like who we are, as opposed to put all this like massive pressure on people to look a certain way.
Speaker 1:So we're trying to have those conversations with young people now, because it can be a bit debilitating and scary for them, and it can be a reason why they're not getting involved in sport or why they're dropping out of sport as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they could be under eating on things. They could be very self-conscious. Yeah, people that maybe don't want to swim if they don't want to be in swimming dogs or certain sports where they don't feel comfortable. Or people think an athlete looks a certain way. You know, they're X height and X many kilos, and all this and they must all have six packs. It's like most of them actually don't. Yeah, it's not the truth of it.
Speaker 2:So we're trying to demonstrate inclusivity, I suppose across our platform as well. We featured over 900 different female athletes last year. In 2024 alone, we did over 15,000 different features. But we're showing people of all different shapes, sizes, from a range of different sports, like trying to cover disability sport as much as possible as well and just show a reflective, representative society so that people see some that they relate to and can be inspired by and, like you said earlier, like having that, like visibility, to say, oh, I can do that too.
Speaker 2:I see that so-and-so is playing badminton. I never thought badminton was an option and now I'm gonna go and give it a go, like whatever it is. You see that like in entrepreneurship and I'm sure you see it in male dominated industries like, um, my cousin actually is in like construction and that as a woman, and she talked about how, like we're not targeting women to enter into construction as a society at all, like we're not appealing to 50% of the population. So I don't know what runs in the blood, but my god, there's a lot of you yeah so, in terms of your platform, the her sport, her sportie, isn't it?
Speaker 1:what do you do? I know you said that you you represented 900 athletes there last year. What information are you giving out? How do you make your money, etc. And what, where are you trying to elevate it to?
Speaker 2:we founded her sport to create cultural change. Our vision is equal opportunity in sport, regardless of gender. So what opportunity means for us is that a girl or a boy, a man or a woman can walk into a sports club and gets the opportunity to be involved in sport, whether that's at local club level, and they want to play socially or they want to go right to the top and go to a world championships or a world cup or an Olympic games. It's also that if a girl or a woman wants to coach, that the right environment is there, that the right support is there, that they're treated with respect If they're female referees, if you have women on committees, if you have women that want to work in sport.
Speaker 2:I always loved sports but never thought it was a career, never thought it was something. I thought I'd have to be a physio or a nutritionist, which weren't really for me, and or a coach in swimming, which wasn't going to be a very lucrative career anyway. So I thought that would be a hobby as opposed to something that could be my job. So it's demonstrating that you can work in sports, marketing, sponsorship, thinking of all the subjects in school and like what you could use maths for, like engineering, like there's so much like look at whoop garmin, like all of the things that you could use like biology for like there's just there's so many jobs in sports that we have to demonstrate and talk about as well. So there are some of the things that's interesting, because I'm just thinking of the athletes.
Speaker 1:But you're saying that there are so many more jobs in sports that could be done by women.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so many broadcasting, like media, like we with we do an annual her sport awards and we looked reflect like we did the fourth or fifth year this year and our whole production team for most years, except like one person, has been male and it's just by chance that this has happened. I mean, all day, every day, we talk about women in sport, and very inclusive, obviously and we were kind of like, are there just less women in this industry? And then we made a call out to get more women in on our production team this year and we had a few people, like a few women, come to shadow and then a few women that were camera operators and that to bring them into the fold, to bring them in and give them the opportunities, and so that we're actively thinking about the opportunities that they can have. And then one of the other things that we talk about a lot is women as sports fans, so welcoming them in to be a sports fan, that you feel like you can go to the pub and watch sport and you're not like what's she doing here, that you can go and watch a game and feel like you belong and feel like it's you know, you're included, that you're part of the community where it can be a little bit exclusive sometimes, or you might be one of very few women that are kind of in that society and are in that community and you need to get on with the lads to kind of to do it.
Speaker 2:Not everybody you know maybe feels comfortable being the only woman in a group of six and or eight or whatever it is. So they're the things that we're trying to change, like it's the whole ecosystem, which is a lot. So what do we do? I don't know how to do that. Now I'll try explain how we do it. So we started off with visibility. We started off with providing media coverage. At the time, four percent of sports media coverage was going to girls women in sport four percent, yeah.
Speaker 1:So very, very low statistic and isn't that interesting. And I said this to you earlier, because if there's a male sport on tv, people are watching, like the male rugby or whatever, and then the female sport tv, less people watch it. I don't know they may find it less interesting or not, I don't think that it's less interesting, but it's just that less watch it. Therefore, there's less advertising opportunities for advertisers because they're like, well, it's only getting this amount of views, whereas the male sports get this amount of views, so then there's less money being put into it. So then it has is a vicious cycle of less visibility, less money, less funding, less everything. So how do we elevate it above that it's? It feels like a bit of an uphill battle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no it absolutely is and that's what we're trying to change like. That's where the visibility work that we're doing is trying to build relationships and connections with female athletes and female teams. If we're showing the same team three times a year, you're not getting the opportunity to get to know the players, to get to know the team, to have that connection with them, to buy into wanting to come back and watch again, because it's not normal where, if we're seeing men's sports team play week in, week out, we build those relationships and the connection you feel?
Speaker 2:you know the players exactly okay. So there's a huge amount of work needs to be done on the opportunity to elevate those stories, because you do buy into the personal. It's not. It's not always about the athletic ability or the competitiveness, like how many people sit and watch absolutely crap football matches and they don't. It's like they still want to be part of the journey because they want to see x player play, or like they're just buying into the whole community of it.
Speaker 2:So we have to give women's sports the opportunity to build that connection with fans. There is like some progress being made for maybe particular athletes or particular teams in the wider media landscape and digital media and I suppose the world wide web has opened things up a lot for women's sport and female athletes. Women's sports fans are very comfortable online. They're very comfortable finding these like weird links somewhere that they could watch it, or like YouTube streams and like just kind of digging through to like know where to watch it. In terms of the numbers, like we've three over 315 000 people in our community in a small country that we've built with limited resource. So that demonstrates that there is a demand, there is an interest in women's sport. There is another organization that does media coverage similarly to us in the states, and they've over a million people follow them on instagram alone. So there is demand.
Speaker 1:You have to just give it look it's 50 of the bloody population and, like moms and dads out there, they want to have the same. They want their sons and their daughters in the same opportunities, don't they?
Speaker 1:most of them, yeah, most of them do and if I had a daughter, oh my goodness, I'd be like at the side of the pitch like I do my boys. You know I have a little niece now. She's gorgeous and she's my sister's daughter and my sister played competitive soccer for years. She's on the Irish team and loved it and we're just dying for her to get her little pair of football boots and go out and play.
Speaker 1:Like it's amazing. But similarly and we're going to talk about the facilities later on but my sister was saying like so she still was playing. Up until a couple years ago she was playing soccer for a local team and she said that she turned up at a match one day and the boys not men, the boys were playing a friendly match and they had access to the changing rooms and the women who were turning up for their competitive match didn't, and Rachel had to use like a urinal type thing and pee in the car. That's just unacceptable, isn't it?
Speaker 2:it's really common adult women's teams being deprioritized for junior boys teams happens across the country a lot. One case that we have a super champion for her sport. She's like 14 years old and she's obsessed with what we do and has taken part in some of the content that we have done and actually spoke at the launch of the Her Sport Foundation. But when I was chatting to her before the foundation to see kind of what stories she might share at the foundation with the room that we had, she was telling me how their team showed up for a competitive match and we're going to use the main pitch in their club and the boys of the same age group showed up for training and the girls team was asked to go out onto the back pitch. So that's the same level, same age. You're talking to 13 and 14 year old kids to teach them who's more straight away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's not the first time they've seen it I'm sure being 12 and 13 and 14, I'm sure they've seen it before and she said herself and a couple of other of the girls were very irritated by it and asked like who's making this decision? This isn't fair. We have a match. They only have training and we're being asked to move and that's just kind of a direct comparison and instantly is telling the girls that they're less than that, they're less important. And these are the words that I'm having conversations with her and she's telling me. They had their team split in half over the summer. They had 30 girls. They now are scraping together a team to still play camogie Because girls are dropping out, because they're dropping out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, my goodness, all of these subliminal messages that we're giving our little girls too. Yeah, totally yeah.
Speaker 2:So they like we. I'll finish on this point. First, maybe the team is halved. They're an under 14s team and if they keep going at the rate that they're going, or if they lose five more players, like it's Gaelic games. So they need 15 on the pitch, not just 15 on the panel. They end up down at 12 or 13 or 10. All of the girls won't be able to play because they won't have a squad.
Speaker 2:So when it comes to team sports, it's so important to try and keep a group together, to try and keep as many together as possible, because once you're down at that kind of that kind of edge number where you just about have enough, if it drops down, then then all of them can't participate and that causes a whole other thing.
Speaker 2:When then you don't have, you know, maybe they're at under 12s level. They had 12 teams in a league, but by under 16s they might only have seven teams, because all the clubs are struggling with the same thing. So it's really disappointing, I think, when you hear stuff like that, the subliminal messaging. We spoke to that girl and a couple other girls in the club she would have been 11 at the time. We had kids from 8 to 13 and they said they see the lack of people that show up to support them in comparison to the boys that show up to support the senior women's teams versus the senior men's teams that go to Croke Park to watch the men's and the women's teams. They know that Croke Park is not full and they know for the men's team men's matches are in finals. People are fighting over tickets and the cost of the tickets are astronomically different. They know they don't see much women's sport on television or in the newspaper.
Speaker 1:I think the newspapers are still like there's like a self-perpetuating fallacy there too, isn't it just? Yeah, it keeps the cycle going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's less women then entering, so the base level, yeah, is lower and people will leave for different reasons, like there's people that like adult women's teams, like at a point some of the adult women are gonna be like, forget this. I'm not just going to keep showing up for a fight all the time if the club isn't treating me properly, if the coaches aren't treating me properly, if we're not getting coaches, if we're not getting facilities. I'm paying my membership, the same as Jim over there is paying his membership and we get 10% of the resource that they get. And resource can can look different. It can be the pitch access, it can be access to gyms. I know there's lots of clubs that the women's teams barely get access. The women's teams get awkward times. They get the late night times and the times that might be you know five o'clock. Who's finished work at five o'clock? Like not the majority of a team, maybe two or three, but not a whole team can actually be there.
Speaker 1:Is this gaelic games, mainly you're talking about Across the board.
Speaker 2:It's across the board. Yeah, it tends to be more so when the teams are split by gender. As opposed to athletics, swimming, gymnastics are more inclusive because male and female athletes will train alongside each other. When it comes into resource management, and it's like we want this and it's like no, we want this, when you're kind of fighting for something like clubs have limited resources but even in access to coaches and stuff, that women's teams, a senior women's competitive team, could have a lower qualified coach than an under 13s boys team, genuinely it's just the way some of these things are happening and then you will have people walking away from participating.
Speaker 2:There can be an undertone, a cultural thing in clubs as well. Women's sports not as good, or there's this whole thing around like we have more male membership than we do have female membership. So they need to get more resources, they need this. It's like, well, maybe if you put more effort and resource into the women's side, you might actually have more women's membership. Maybe people are walking away because you're not giving us the support, giving us the resource, giving us the respect that we deserve. They're kind of challenging things to to try and overcome, but I suppose through the visibility work that we're doing is is showcasing all the role models that are there.
Speaker 2:Visibility work is that social media or yeah, yeah, all of the stories that we're covering on the website, on the social media platform, like we're putting out four or five pieces of content a day and trying to share a diverse range of stories, trying to share a diverse range of athletes, trying to elevate followers engaged.
Speaker 1:Do they like it? Yeah?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, if you look at the platform, like it's always like high engagement, comments, likes the whole lot in comparison to, kind of sometimes, other platforms that are out there that aren't getting the like. All our followers are real, like you know, and so, yeah, they're really highly engaged and they love the range of stuff that we cover and that's important to us to show that, like diverse access to sports and you can do football, you can do luge, you can do badminton, basketball, like whatever it is. Like we want to show all the opportunities that are there to encourage girls, women, to be involved and, again, in whatever role that plays.
Speaker 1:Like we cover stuff about like referees that are doing amazing things, coaches that are doing amazing things yeah, because I know I always thought about I said earlier about that it was just the athletes but obviously it's so important that there's other, yeah, roles and that women can do.
Speaker 2:When it comes to decision making positions. Like we need women in committee positions. Like we need them there advocating for and speaking up on behalf of girls, women's teams. Because if we have the same committee for the last like 10, 20, 30 years, and like there are a lot of committees around the country that have 65, 70 year old men that don't have a clue what it's like to be a 13 year old girl, don't have a clue what it's like to be an adult woman, so we need to have people that can have these discussions and make sure that the right resource is there. Like that, we are understanding that women's bodies are different, so we might need to adjust the training program because there's menstrual cycles to consider. Maybe someone is pregnant, maybe you know someone's going through menopause. Like there's different things that need to be considered having period products in the toilets and bathrooms and that to make it just in case anybody has their period and I know period poverty is a lot higher than people think it is is it?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, yeah, I've spoken to um. There's a lady, claire, who runs homeless period ireland they might be renamed Positive Period Ireland actually and she said it's a lot more prevalent than we realize and it's just the simple thing of having period products accessible For some people. It will be from a period poverty perspective and if you have young girls that are just kind of figuring themselves out, I would turn around if I surprisingly got my period and be like hey, laura, have you a tampon I can just use, please. Yeah, where, like a 12 year old or 13 year old, they might not have told anyone other than, like maybe their mom or somebody, that they got their period. So to have that there and just normalize it. And like, with the workshops that we do, we talk about those things to normalize it, like half the population are going to have a period in a menstrual cycle. So it's no big deal, I know, I know when I'm sitting here with you, like you certainly wouldn't be shy to tell.
Speaker 2:And then, like, when it comes to coaching in particular, sports coaches are still predominantly male.
Speaker 2:They haven't necessarily ever had a conversation about a period within their own family not a mind, obviously, having experienced one and they're putting their hand up to volunteer and offer their time and coach a panel and you need to support them with how to have these conversations.
Speaker 2:Some of them will say, yeah, that's fine, I will speak to the group and I it will normalize it and we'll take it as something like it's.
Speaker 2:It's impacts your performance, it impacts your training and they can handle having that conversation.
Speaker 2:But there's also a lot of men that feel uncomfortable having those like it's different sometimes with an adult women's team than with a junior girls team and they can be like I don't know what to say to a 13 or 14 year old girl who's, again, still just learning about their body. So how are we going to support those coaches to manage that panel so that everybody is comfortable? So do we have some of the senior athletes that come along every now and then, the senior female athletes to support and to give advice and top tips? Is there a mom that comes down and is available just to support and does the water bottles and helps organize, like different groups and stuff, and then is the person that's there that they can go to and say I'm not feeling so well or I think I just got my period and can offer that kind of lending ear and support. They're the kind of things that if we only have men in decision making powers, then we're not considering these things and then we're not opening up the the whole world of potential.
Speaker 1:That's what it could be yeah, and you can't expect men to know what they don't know. No, you know, and that's the whole thing, isn't it? And that's you know. I talk about that all the time, like a man isn't going to know about something that he's never been told about. Yeah, and there's so many men that are open to this, particularly nowadays because they know a lot of it is unintentional.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, it's just the way that the structures are being and we need people men and women to be educated about.
Speaker 2:You know the that's like we go into corporates and we talk about these things and the reason that we're in the corporates is to connect with parents, future parents, coaches and committee members from a whole range of sports and different communities, and that you have people that are then able to put their hand up in a meeting, like whether it's with coaches or committees, or a parent that's just chatting to a coach and say, actually, maybe we should look at this slightly differently with this girl's team or this women's team or for the whole.
Speaker 2:You know, female membership of the club and it's brave enough to say, just because we've been doing this the same way for the last 30 years doesn't mean that it's the most inclusive way of doing this when it comes to our female membership, like, maybe we should be re-looking at things and, like I said, if you have women that just keep walking out the door and your membership is 25% or 30% female, look at the way that the club is functioning, look at the culture, look at how you're divvying out the resources. Maybe there's a problem with the allocation, and if you actually are more like, put structures in place to be more inclusive, then you might get more female membership because they'll feel more welcome, they'll feel more heard, they'll feel more supported.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, there's a lot in it and you're only a team of eight, so as a team of eight, you can't go to every club in the land. So how do you elevate, like, how do you get your message out there apart from your social media? Yeah, how do you do it? How do you have this ripple effect? As I said, a lot of the.
Speaker 2:A lot of the work that we do is visibility, and it's so. Visibility for us means, across our social media channels and with the website, a heavy in terms of the resource and investment on our team. That's what most of our team is involved in. We're heavily reliant on advertising and sponsorship, so working with the right partners to fund us to be able to do these things. We calculated that about 70 percent of our coverage is not sponsored, is unfunded, so it's actually unfunded by the advertising and sponsorship deals that we have, but also unfunded by any kind of grants or anything that might be out there, because we're not eligible for a number of different supports.
Speaker 2:Why? There are a number of grants that are available for media organizations and until the last few months, we were ineligible for a lot of them because we were not in broadcasting and because we're digital, because we're doing our media coverage online, and it started to change a little bit. So hoping that we will be able to get some more support over, you know, the next few years with that, but not holding our breath either. Also, in in the way that some of the government organisations are structured, it makes it very difficult for us to kind of access funding. So a lot of people think we get a lot of kind of funding and that from Sport Ireland, which isn't the case. Like we do, you know, work with them on different things, but they're not heavily funding us or anything.
Speaker 1:And if you go into a corporation to talk, do you get paid by the corporation? Yeah, okay, yeah. Then the other thing I doubt you get paid by schools to go in and talk to them we do not a lot, yeah, okay yeah, and we have to be very we have to be very careful in terms of how we allocate our resources.
Speaker 2:So if you look at other media organizations as well, a lot of them have subscription models and paywalls and that's not something that we can do because we're trying to elevate and promote women's sport. It's a new concept, like we need to still build those connections with female athletes and stories, so we can't do the same as some of these other organizations that then can have like funding from their community. We did launch a members platform called the MVP platform. We offer like unique benefits in that we do monthly competitions and we have like tickets available to different sporting events and that kind of thing, and it's a five euro a month or 52 euro a year at the moment, and that's where we're trying to get the support from our community to help be able to fund the 70% of content that isn't funded by anybody else at this time. So the only reason we're doing that content is to create a cultural change, is to make an impact for girls and women, is to for them in terms of participation and visibility and to feel like there's role models there, and then also to make that change for the female athletes that need the support for their profile to be elevated because they're not getting media coverage anywhere else and that we're trying to then make their name and they're just more valuable so that they can then get sponsorship deals, that they can stay in sport.
Speaker 2:There was an athlete, emir constantine. She has played a couple of different sports.
Speaker 1:She's rugby, isn't she? Yeah, yeah, she recently retired from rugby, did she? Yeah, little girl as well. I saw her. She's a little boy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, was it all right, but we she won, uh, personality of the year at the her sport awards this year. Okay, and in the interview you know speaking with her after the win, you know she was saying the decision and the difficult decision she had to come to to step back from sport. A number of things came into it, but having a boy was one, having a mortgage was another and the you know rugby salary at the moment just isn't conducive with the stage of the life, stage of life that she's at. We're trying to create that change so that Emer in the future whoever that might be that the current squad now that are going to the women's world cup that I can guess half the country don't know that they're competing in later this year, that they don't have to make these decisions that we're not like. We want to do some research around, like what is the average age of women going to be competing in the Rugby World Cup later this year? Because I would say it's quite on the low side, because once people are through university and maybe hang on to like 25, 26 and then they come to a point in their life where they're like, well, I want to buy a house or I need to be thinking just about being more financially sustainable for a number of different reasons. Or they want to have a family. They have to be able to financially do these things. So that's where the visibility can also play a huge role in changing that opportunity for them. So it there's a huge like business case and commercial model for all of what we're doing.
Speaker 2:But we're a little bit, I suppose, hamstrung on the type of content that we're doing because just sometimes the time like you know that yourself like the production time that it takes to pull together some things, and like we're just trying to share as many stories.
Speaker 2:But we'd love to do more podcasting again. We'd love to do more like mini documentaries and like all of this kind of thing too. So for that we need the resource and the funds and the backing. So it is like a community driven thing and there will be an email going out to everybody shortly talking about like in essence it's about over 150 grand. It costs us a year, excluding myself and my business partner and all the brain power that it takes from us, but like that's the rest of our team to produce all of the content and just the sheer volume that it is and you know, 99% of our community believe that we're having a positive impact on change for women in sport. We're also one of the only companies in the world that that does this work, that is exclusively dedicated to covering female athletes and like we would very much see the work that we're doing as as a public service. There's not 100% other organizations.
Speaker 1:I have to talk to you about Fab U sponsoring in some way, honestly, like I'm like you're just speaking my language, but it's all about that empowering females, and if we do it for our little ones, then they grow up more empowered women and the power of sport is just.
Speaker 2:There's so much impact that sport can have on somebody and I know that from a personal perspective. People kind of expect sometimes this kind of horror story or experience that I would have had in sport and the reality is, like most of the experiences I've had in sport I love sport they've mostly been positive. I wouldn't be promoting it if I didn't have a mostly positive experience and there's just so much the sport can give you, whether it's as an athlete or as a fan, like I've met people that travel all over the world to go and engage, like to follow the Olympics and the Paralympics, like what an amazing thing to be part of yeah we know in Ireland we have this like huge value on the community that sport can bring, but at the moment we're not really delivering that opportunity for women.
Speaker 2:So it's so it's so far beyond the competing and the training like there's so much more that it offers. But, yeah, I suppose the the workshops that we do. Yes, we go into corporates and, yeah, like it's a reasonable fee that that we get paid to do that. A lot of that is myself and one other person in the organization. We also give opportunities to athletes to come and join us for those as well, so we're trying to provide financial opportunities for them as well as balancing their athletic career and to make some money on the side to keep them tipping along. And then we do the workshops in schools and clubs. We do run into a lot of challenges with schools where they can't always afford to have us in, so trying to get like bigger levels of sponsorship where we can subsidise that. Do you work with the Shona Project? No, we don't. We've challenged them a few times and we need to have a bigger conversation to see what we can do.
Speaker 2:But they're a charity organization too. So, yeah, it's like you're both competing for the same thing the way that we're actually legally structured is we are.
Speaker 2:We started off as a limited company. Yeah, the whole, I suppose, charity world like like we're 24 25 when we started the business, so we're just like oh, it sounds like a lot of paperwork. Yeah, like you know, just to jump through like let's see how we go first, and very much understood like the business model when it came to like the media side and like that potential there and, as I said, like there is a huge kind of commercial opportunity and that's going to grow. But we need kind of support now to be able to keep doing it so then it can be sustainable kind of in the future.
Speaker 2:We also then launched our foundation, the Her Sport Foundation, in November so that will help support access to workshops for schools that can't afford them. So we're currently delivering subsidized workshops in schools. So we're rolling out a whole plethora of them at the moment to just get in front of as many kids as possible and support them, because we want to make sure that, like a financial barrier isn't a barrier for them, and we also I'll explain the foundation now so it's an amount of it goes to education. We also will be doing a grant system for schools, clubs, athletes to like support with different things that they need. Like we get requests every single week for kit, equipment, travel expenses. Like so much that like athletes and teams, like it's not just high performance, it's from grassroots high performance needs you get requests for it all the time. Can you sponsor?
Speaker 1:us, oh right, all the time, but you can't sponsor anyone, no it's not fair to pick and choose.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're going to make this application system where we can support with getting a set of hurlies to a school, getting jerseys to a club, players that might need boots and there was an international rugby player last year that was like please, can somebody just sponsor me a pair of boots because she's flying through them and I thought might be a grand year that she needs. That's it. So we're trying to put this centralized system together where we can support from your local level up to your high performance level to support with the financial barriers that girls and women are facing. And then we'll also be doing an amount of research and advocacy. So annually we do two campaigns, one on international day of the girl and one international women's day with the foundation. We're going to make sure that we absolutely can deliver those campaigns every single year, because we haven't been able to. Other years we've been able to. They're kind of a little hit and miss. Sometimes we can do them, sometimes we can't, depending on the resource. Like it's quite expensive actually to do some of the campaigns that we're trying to do. One of them has reached about 20 million people organically, but imagine we had budget to put that on television or on the radio and like, just get it beyond the her sport platform. So there's a commitment there.
Speaker 2:And then also, with the amount of research that we want to do to explore, you know really truly how impactful sport can be.
Speaker 2:So I suppose, going back to maybe the career and the leadership elements that we were talking about earlier, I would reckon that, when it comes to gender pay gap, that it's actually former athletes or people, women that have participated in sports, that are probably paid more than female, like women in the workplace, that are not participating in sport.
Speaker 2:Because I think you can go in and ask, I think you can negotiate, I think you kind of have built that bravery. And then also, when it comes to, like stereotypically male industries, I think that the women in those industries are probably more likely to be from a sporting background as well, again, having built the confidence and from being in those environments and maybe going against the grain and a little bit against the norm. So, looking at that, and then we would have been invited to put forward recommendations for inclusion and sport by the Oireachtas last year. So we have to have time available to engage a government. We were in with the TD about two weeks ago talking about a number of the issues. Like we look at the whole system, like we're looking at all stakeholders, it's not just 10 times more people than you already have yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, honestly this is full time for you, non-stop yeah yeah, eight people full time.
Speaker 2:Jeez, give me another 10 or 20 and I have stuff for them to do. Yeah, so yeah, when we're engaging with government like was involved in national women and girls strategy towards the end of last year as well, putting different lenses on issues that girls and women face and I would have put the sporting lens on it and looking at all these different things and the challenges that girls and women face, and whether that's to do with safety, like talking about women exercising in the winter time and being able to go for a run in the dark like it's just not possible. And one of the things I raised with the TD was like, can we just get lights on in some of the parks for a while, like six to eight in the evening? When people are finished work and want to go exercise, can they go to the local park, know that there's going to be other women and other people in the park and they can safely exercise, rather than being like I'm actually not going to step foot outside my house because I'm afraid to go for a 5k run because I don't know who's out there and I don't have someone to go with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's, there's. Like that's kind of one element of it I know we touched on earlier, like before we started chatting, but about the safety in terms of like power dynamics, sometimes within roles, like there's a lot more men in committee roles, coaching roles, you know from grassroot high performance level again, and we just need to ensure that the safeguarding, the right safeguarding is, is in place, like there's a number of different instances that have happened of the soccer team in the last year.
Speaker 1:That was highlighted with the abuse that went on there really wasn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that story, the light was shone on it 15-20 years after it happened in terms of Do you want to explain a little bit about what it was to any person that may not have seen that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would recommend watching it. I don't want to give it. I don't have all the full details coming to mind, but a number of international players and other players that were involved in football in Ireland, female players were going through. Some of it was to do with a course that they were doing like a coaching development course, and then there was something it was happening in another structure, within the organisation as well, where female players were being taken advantage of.
Speaker 1:They may drop from teams if they, you know, rebuked someone's advances.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there was yeah, so there were were two people specifically that were involved in it, in powerful positions, so they're one of them was a coach, and then there was like his role might have been as a someone else's role might have been as a selector, so some of it was based, some of them were looking to play for the international team and, yes, there was advances made on on some people and, you know, some people were abused. And then there was also a huge attitude of homophobia and different comments made to players and just a very I don't even know how to explain like the kind of environment, unwelcoming, unsupportive and abusive, abusive environment and, as you said, like some people were just, you know, dropped out of the squads and and some people have had like life-altering experiences that are really still struggling with how they were treated and I'd recommend that people go and watch it to get a true grasp and understanding of what happened. And then there was also an instance in a gym this year where there was women that were being photographed, unbeknownst to themselves, in kind of a physio or massage room. And then there was an instance with within Irish boxing where I was the president or somebody at committee level was accused of assaulting somebody, not in boxing, but somebody that worked for him. She was a teenager and it's still.
Speaker 2:I suppose it just demonstrates, like the different kind of power positions that sometimes men can be in that are that the safeguarding really just isn't in place all the time. And obviously I don't want to paint everybody with the same brush, it's not that. It's just that we do need to consider, when we're looking at the safety of women and just generally as society we know that perpetrators are more likely to be male that we're setting up the right structures in the environments that women are going to be in sport to make sure that they are safe and the right safeguarding is in place.
Speaker 2:So yeah that's something that I think struck me when I was having that conversation or with, you know, these people at the National Women and Girls Strategy was who's advocating for that? Like who's joining the dots? That's me, on a Monday, going in unbeknownst to what conversations are going to happen, and something that I don't really get that much time to think about because we've so much else going on. But somebody needs to be having these conversations to make sure that the right environments are there and the people are being treated fairly. There are conversations around coach and player relationships and stuff too, and just again ensuring, as you said, kind of like with the advances that it's all, it's all fair, wanted, welcomed, you know, that relationships are managed properly and it's not this kind of power dynamic which happens in a workplace environment as well.
Speaker 2:Like we have to be, we have to be aware of these things and just put in the right kind of structures and stuff yeah, we can't be calling ourselves either yeah, yeah, and it just like that that actually I left that meeting, I suppose, kind of feeling a bit overwhelmed from the things that I kind of brought up, because it feels like a huge amount of responsibility on my shoulders to be sitting there and and to be having these conversations that, like lots of other people are not thinking about because we look at this whole kind of stakeholder system. So that's where I suppose the foundation comes into support to allow, like, whether it's myself or some of the others on the team, be engaging with government and being engaging with policymakers to make sure that there are people that are there advocating that truly understand, like, how the ecosystem is set up. So, yeah, that's the media education foundation, we've covered the members platform and we have merchandise too. So you have merch?
Speaker 1:yeah, okay, and you can buy it on your website? Yeah, yeah. And how can people get in touch with you if they want to help or if they feel that they can do something for you?
Speaker 2:yeah, my personal email is neve at her sportie. It's very easy to remember and like on instagram. On LinkedIn, I would say like personally. That's where I am. If you put in Neve Tallon like, I'll come up. But in relation to, I suppose contacting the organisation hello at hersportie would be the best way.
Speaker 1:We get inundated with messages on Instagram and we see a lot of them, but it's easier to go on email yeah there's a lot of a lot of work that we're doing you have opened my eyes today to the other aspects that I didn't think that we were going to be talking about, though, so it's very it is interesting, and you could do 10 times more people on your team. Yeah, absolutely not, niamh. What bit of advice would you give young people today?
Speaker 2:I think just like back yourself and go for it.
Speaker 2:You know like they're. Like we have to build belief and confidence in like what we can do, and I think there's sometimes like I was having a conversation over the last few days about can one person like change the world or make an impact, and maybe you can't fix all the problems, but I suppose, even reflecting on the journey that I've had, like the concept came from me, one person, and I've surrounded myself with the right people to be able to make this impact, this change like on the country and like we've had this massive ripple effect already with the limited resource, a huge amount like to my business partner as well, but the two of us are like driving that forward. So there's two people that are making like a national change. And we've also had like global impact as well, like some of our the campaigns I was talking about earlier have hit different parts of the world like have been viral in like Pakistan, india and stuff, and it's crazy like when you see that like it's taken off, yeah, and they're all relating.
Speaker 2:They're like we need you over here, so like someday. But yeah, like I think the worst that anybody can say to you is no, so like, take a chance on yourself and if you want something whether it's like a job, like just put the application in. Like the worst that's going to happen is you might not get the job or you might not get the promotion. Like we got bolder and braver like fairly quickly within having the business, like within the first year of reaching out to people and asking for advice, asking for help. I think you just have to go for it and kind of reach for the stars sometimes and like look, not everything's going to work out, not everything works out for all the time, like at all. But I think just put yourself forward, because if you don't, like, you're going to miss out on opportunities or you know things that you could have had, but you maybe just didn't have that kind of self-belief and confidence.
Speaker 1:I think okay, and what is the meaning of life?
Speaker 2:oh, the meaning of life making the most out of life as you can, being the best that you can be. And look, we're all like not the best. Lots of times I'm sure we waste loads of time scrolling and sitting watching tv and doing stuff that we're not meant to like. They're not that we're not meant to be doing, but things that maybe we could spend time a little bit better. But it is, I think, yeah, just trying to make the most out of it, and I think that's something that I don't always find like easy. I think being an entrepreneur and being a business owner, like you kind of live a certain lifestyle for a while and when we started our business, like we were 24, 25, so we kind of lived like students longer than we should have. Like we kind of carry that lifestyle into adulthood and then, like my friends are doing different things and I'm like, oh, maybe I should try and get there too.
Speaker 2:But I think that's something that I'm really trying to focus on at the moment is making sure that you know outside of work that I'm doing things, getting all these experiences, like making sure to have that balance and make the most of, I suppose, the time that I do have. Like I kind of feel that I've probably restricted myself a little bit over the last couple years Just from the point of view your work's been so busy. Yeah, work is very busy and then, like, you obviously have to like figure things out, like financially and that kind of thing, and like we we were students, like when we pretty much left, and like I worked for a little bit before and my business partner worked for a couple years before as well but, um, in terms of like resource, like we didn't have loads of resource and we poured ourselves into this. But I suppose they talk about like having to make sure that your own like cup is full and it's not sustainable to keep pushing yourself and like maybe restricting yourself from doing things that you kind of enjoy and stuff. So, um, yeah, I think I don't know. Like I'm 31 now.
Speaker 2:I think I just want to make sure that the next number of years in my life are things that I'm making the most out of it and going on different trips or seeing different friends, like making sure that you're prioritizing stuff in your own personal life as well, just like making the most of it. So I think that's kind of when people start businesses, you can get very sucked into it and into the business and I have to be working all the time and all this and that's just. It's just not gonna last. So I'm trying to just like rebalance those things to make sure that it's sustainable, because you have to have the right like energy and motivation coming in to do the work and particularly like I do feel a weight on my shoulders to like change things for girls and women. So I have to have that energy and motivation when I come to work and not be, burnt out by it.
Speaker 2:Essentially so, but it's yeah getting there.
Speaker 1:Niamh, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and the very best luck with your endeavours, and I just I can see you just going from strength to strength and I just I want to jump in there and help you. I've got to come in for a few days. Well, listen, you take care and thanks so much for your time. Thanks, william, for having me. Are you feeling wired by day and restless at night? Well, fabio Oronor, relax is your daily blend of botanicals, b vitamins and magnesium to help you feel calm and balanced, ease into deep rest and wake up refreshed. Check out our amazing reviews on fabiwellnesscom. Available on fabiwellnesscom and in pharmacies and health food stores nationwide.