“Equality, Basic Fairness, Is Not Just About Unbiased Hiring Or Equal Pay, It’s About A Whole Thinking And Relating To Others.”

In this week’s Meet The Team piece, iSportConnect’s Editor-at-Large Jay Stuart provides us with some of his key thoughts after watching last week’s ‘Level The Playing Field’ Global Forum that iSportConnect hosted alongside the International Tennis Federation, centred on gender equality.

Sport is a microcosm of society.

That’s not a new observation but hearing it made during the ITF’s Advantage All event last week I was really struck by the truth of it because the points that hit home for me related to the world we live in, not only to tennis or sport. Indeed, I was very conscious of the leading role that tennis and sport have to play in changing things for the better in the bigger picture. 

Billie Jean King, who is surely the world number one of championing gender equality, made a particularly memorable point that I had not heard before. The gist of it was that when a young woman works in a company or organisation, the tendency is to judge her on the narrow basis of the job she’s doing, as if that’s all she’s ever going to do. A young man on the other hand is evaluated more on his potential, on what he can offer in the future. It’s an assessment that my own experience of the workplace over the years supports. 

Although many people would say that attitudes have changed for the better, let’s remember that some organisations are more enlightened in this respect than others. And some countries are too. But the scope of Advantage All, in line with the ITF’s remit, is global and whenever and wherever this gap in perception is the case, females are not being given equal treatment or opportunity.

Equality, basic fairness, is not just about unbiased hiring or equal pay, it’s about a whole way of thinking and relating to others. It’s obvious that the ones most in need of getting with the programme and thinking and relating differently are men, but the inertia runs deeper. So much of the problem is unconscious and many girls and women also need to shake off attitudes of resignation or accepting the status quo in favour of self-empowerment.

I shared Billie’s point about how women and men are perceived with male friends this weekend. By a nice coincidence it was after playing doubles tennis (her favourite) with them and afterwards it occurred to me that all of us also have daughters, another nice coincidence. Simple word of mouth at the everyday level is important. What inspirational leaders like Billie Jean King give us is the words to pass along. To make change happen, we need be sure that more of us than the fathers of daughters take those words to heart. 

Use the videos available within the piece or head to the iSportConnect TV YouTube channel to watch the full event back.