In this week’s packed Women in Sport Weekly, supported by our partnership with Lidl, we look at on new research on the attractiveness of women’s sport to Irish sponsors, new support to boost media coverage and visibility, and some spectacular achievements in our coverage of Women in Sport on Sport for Business over the past seven days.
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THE TIME IS NOW FOR WOMEN’S SPORT
The results were published this week of the latest wave in the onside Sport Industry Monitor, in collaboration with Sport for Business and our membership.
Among the valuable insights was a significant lift in the likelihood of brands getting involved in partnerships that will bolster Women’s Sport.
The change in the last six months is exponential with 69 per cent saying they were now more likely to get involved in partnerships with Women’s sport, a 34 per cent lift since we last tested the water in September of last year.
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BLACKMORE’S RED LETTER DAY
It is hard to really comprehend just how significant the past month has been for Rachael Blackmore.
Four weeks ago she was feted within horse racing as being a rider of rare talent. She had appeared for the last two years on our 50 Women of Influence in Irish Sport list. This morning though she woke up as a genuine international sporting superstar.
The Aintree Grand National is the one race of the year that everybody knows about, that an estimated 600 million people around the world will have watched on Saturday, and the trophy for which is now sitting on her mantlepiece.
Horse racing is one of the very few sporting arenas in which men and women compete against each other on level terms. When Red Rum won his third race back in 1977, Charlotte brew became the first woman to ride in the race. Katie Walsh rode Seabass into third in 2012 and was highlighted in SportsPro magazine the following year as one of the 50 most marketable athletes in the world.
Read more of our tribute to a genuine international superstar.
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SPORT FOR BUSINESS MEDIA MONITORING
Sport for Business is continuing to monitor the coverage of Women’s sport across a selection of Irish mainstream media.
We are currently keeping a close eye on the coverage through April. After a slow start over the Easter weekend, the Irish Times has performed better this week wit over 30 per cent of its sports coverage devoted to Women’s sport on two days this week.
If that can continue as a new standard then it would be a huge step forward. It’s unlikely yet but our monitoring may be playing some small part in keeping editor’s eyes on what is not only the right thing but which can also yield commercial benefit as we saw last week with Guinness and the Irish Independent.
We’ll be publishing our full April review here at the end of this month.
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IRISH RUGBY WOMEN HIT HIGH AGAINST WALES
Last week’s 45-0 win over Wales by the Irish Women’s Rugby team was widely covered and has set up a crunch game tomorrow against France in the Women’s Six Nations.
The try by Beibhinn Parsons in the first half was among the best you will see this season, and Hannah Tyrrell’s kicking, both across the pitch to set up Eimear Considine and from wide on the win when converting tries was a match for anything you will see in any other competition.
Parsons in particular was flagged before as a star of the future. It was our line of the commentary from Fiona Coghlan on RTÉ saying that “she is not a player with the potential to make into a real star, she is a star that is already made.”
There was a neat symmetry as well with Hugh Cahill excitedly breaking into his match commentary to tell everyone that Rachael Blackmore had just won the Grand National.
It’s worth checking out the highlights here from Six Nations.
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GUINNESS ANNOUNCE TANGIBLE IMPACT CAMPAIGN ON MEDIA COVERAGE
Guinness has announced its plans to tackle the lack of visibility for women’s sport and specifically representation of women in rugby, pledging to “#NeverSettle until everyone belongs in sport.”
Ahead of the Women’s Six Nations Finals Weekend, which takes place on Saturday 24th April, Guinness has partnered with Wikimedia to ensure that every member of the competing squads across Ireland and the UK is properly recorded on the site viewed by 18 billion globally every month – adding over 135,000 words to their profiles.
Just 18 per cent of biographies on Wikipedia are of women, but this gap widens further in sport where just 3 per cent of 14,916 rugby-related biographies are of female players and the current Guinness Six Nations men’s squads have 392 per cent more words devoted to them than their female counterparts.
In Ireland, just 17 per cent of the current Women’s Six Nations squad have a presence on Wikipedia, and for those that do, none of the profiles includes an image of the player.
International team pages see a stark disparity also, with the current male rugby squad receiving more than 6,000 words on their page, whereas the women’s team have just over 1,500.
We carried the story last week of the Guinness Advertising in the Irish Independent on the opening Saturday of the Women’s Six Nations and the corresponding lift in coverage which that paper gave over other broadsheets.
We feel there is some improvement being seen on the 6 per cent coverage figure that Guinness is using with our March review showing an average across a selection of Irish media of 9.2 per cent but that is still misrepresentation of the number of women playing and engaging with sport and it is an area that we will continue to cover in detail.
Read more about the campaign launch this week
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NORTHERN IRELAND’S EURO BREAKTHROUGH
Northern Ireland’s qualification for the European Championship finals in England next summer promises to be a real Game Changer for Women’s sport north and south of the border and one of the teams key sponsors has moved quickly to kick off how that impact can be made real.
Electric Ireland has announced the launch of Shooting For The Stars Children’s Competition as part of their Game Changers NI campaign which in partnership with the Irish FA, supports girls’ and women’s football at all levels.
The competition invites children between the ages of 7-11 who are interested in football and stories, to sharpen their pencils, ‘boot up’ the laptops and create their very own story about girls’ football.
Read more about the initiative
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Each week we carry a Women in Sport Weekly Column, highlighting stories here in Ireland and around the world that are relevant to the idea that we are only catching up to what is happening elsewhere and that while we may be strong in some areas, there are certainly others where we need to prod and poke to ensure fairness.
That’s all, it’s not a takeover, it’s not at the expense of sport that is there already, it is just recognition that sport should be more conscious of its obligation to the 50.5 per cent of the population that has just as much right and talent to play sport as anyone.
If you think there is a story around Women in Sport that we should feature please get in touch and let us know.
Sport for Business Partners
