Designing Sport for Women with Suheil Tandon
What led you to start Pro Sport Development, and tell us about how gender and sport come together at PSD?
I had always wanted to make an impact via sport at the grassroots level. Seeing that this space is largely untouched in India, I started Pro Sport Development (PSD) to support sporting development for marginalised and underprivileged youth.
Gender was always a focus for us, from the very beginning. When we decided we wanted to work with youth, that included both boys and girls. In fact, we focused slightly more on girls because girls get even less opportunity than men and boys.
Initially PSD began with the aim to help young people achieve more in sport—the idea was to support marginalised and underprivileged youth that had talent, but didn’t have the access to achieve in sport. However, in our first project with tribal youth, we noticed that sport itself was having a much larger impact on youth – beyond achieving in sport. They were winning medals, but they were also developing soft skills, leadership skills – convincing their community members and parents to stay in school longer, for example. We began to see the power of going beyond sport.
A specific example helped: there was a 16 year old weightlifter, who was extremely talented and promising. However, after a year with us, she never returned to school and we found out that she had been married off. This hit us hard, and we knew we had to move beyond increasing youth chances of succeeding in sport. So we shifted our focus from helping youth achieve in sport to using sport as a tool for the holistic development of youth.
Our early experiences taught us that girls, even from higher socio-economic backgrounds and urban centers, are marginalised in sport. But once we shifted our focus to use sport as a tool for holistic development, we began to see its power to break gender barriers. And soon after, we began to see results. I remember a specific moment, when one of our teams went to participate in a tournament. Our team – quite possibly the only one there which was used to training in mixed gender groups – was also the only one which sat together at lunch, girls and boys mixed. Another team’s coach came up to me to point that out, I hadn’t even noticed. He said, our boys and girls don’t interact like your teams’ does.
What have you learned along the way about designing sport for females?
Sport is a reflection of society, and it has society’s stereotypes and biases integrated into it. If you leave sports as it is, it will discriminate against women and girls.
Even though sport is powerful and a great tool for development, it is inherently biased and it does not serve women and girls. To make sport work for women, you need to deliberately design it to include women. For us this has meant having a mixed gender approach from the very beginning – what that means and how it plays out in our programs to be inclusive & equitable has evolved over the years.
Participatory feedback from all stakeholders is important—and this must be balanced with your values, and what you stand for
Always ask for feedback and input from your participants. Early on, we were working on a girls volleyball team. I assumed that a female coach would be appropriate, but upon asking the girls we learned that they wanted a male coach because they assumed male coaches probably knew the game better. We learned two things from this:
You cannot assume what women want and how “it’s going to work.”
Biases come out through conversation. In this particular case, we were able to use this opportunity to acknowledge the bias the girls had, and explained to them why we had decided upon a female coach and how she’s as good as a male one.
We also include related stakeholders in our feedback collection. For example, if we run our programs through schools, we make sure we are talking to the teachers, the school management and the parents. But something we never negotiated was our mixed gender approach. Instead we designed so that we could ease girls into it – for example, we never forced girls to have a “sports uniform” and in the beginning many were shy to wear tee-shirts and shorts, so they would wear it on top of their uniforms. But over time, they got used to it and got comfortable with it on their own.
Boys are part of the problem, so we have to make them part of the solution—
We were clear from the very beginning that working with one gender doesn’t work for us. We need to include boys and men in the conversation and ensure that all genders are involved. It takes more work, and it’s not easy to convince our stakeholders – but I’ve noticed that those who work with one gender only groups find it hard to approach mixed gender spaces. Many say that we’re working with girls only because boys will take over the field or that boys have already had opportunities and girls have been sidelined so let’s design for girls only. I think creating mixed gender spaces comes back how you design the program.
Here’s how we’re approaching it:
We don’t have 30 boys and girls on a field and say “now, let’s play soccer!” We look into the rules of a sport and adapt it, rather than playing it by the book. We design it so that no one person has an “advantage” and that everyone, with different abilities, has an equal chance to participate and enjoy it. That really works when you are doing mixed gender programming. We have never taught “how to play football,” we do games based on football because the game is focused on leadership and teamwork — that’s our focus — but kids pick up on skills of football along the way. If you were to do it the other way around, where you are teaching how to play football, a mixed gender approach would be tough.
A lot of sport programs and products have focused on solely women because designing for mixed gender can be tough — but I don’t think it’s helpful if you just cut off men and boys. They need to be part of the discussions, interventions and processes because at the end of the day, they are part of the problem and if you don’t make them part of the solution, you can only get so far.
Can you elaborate with an example, how you design a game to work for a mixed-gender group?
For example, if you’re playing a game of soccer with a mixed gender group, it’s not enough to create mixed gender teams. Even with that, you can have the boys just passing the ball to one another. If we see that happening on the field, we pause the game, and change up the rule, where you’re not allowed to pass the ball to someone with the same gender. That’s how girls get an equal chance of playing. And we use the power of debriefs: often we’ve seen that teams who are including their female team members in the game equally have a higher chance of winning. After a game where we see this play out, we’ll get the players together and talk about how inclusivity is not just the right thing to do, it even increases your chances of winning.
What effects of this have you seen on boys?
Many boys feel that girls are not good at sport — and this is a misconception. Through our programs, we’re seeing that they’ve started to respect the girls, and treat them as equals. Early on, even though we were mandating mixed gender teams, girls would be left out of the game – and those teams actually lost. This was a big learning for the boys. The boys who came to our programs thinking they know everything about sports, and girls know nothing, has been turned on its head.
Also in India, there’s little to no interaction between boys and girls most of the time – classrooms are segregated and public spaces don’t allow for it. We’re creating a safe space for them to participate and engage together.
We’re also using this platform as a space to talk about health and menstruation. We don’t make any assumptions about whether or not girls want to play while menstruating – this is up to them because each one’s experience with cramps is different. We include boys in this conversation too so that they don't have any misconceptions about it. Having an open space to tell your coach that you’re having cramps is required. And, for the coach not to assume that menstruation means you sit out is also required.
What are some common misconceptions about designing for women?
That women are not as skilled and interested as men in sport
That giving women the “bare minimum” in sport will suffice. That’s because most people in this space are comparing to the normal of women having no access to sport at all. Part of the reason why we haven’t gone with volunteer led programs is because we want to provide a quality experience to the girls.
About Suheil Tandon
Suheil Tandon is the Director-Founder of Pro Sport Development, an award-winning social enterprise dedicated to utilizing sport for the holistic development of children and youth. Suheil specializes in the sport and development field, with particular expertise of working with diverse groups of young persons. He has a professional background in sports management and coaching, with more than 10 years of varied experiences in global locations including the UK, Canada and India. Suheil believes in the power of sport in catalyzing social transformation, and has led the conceptualization and initiation of several sport and development projects on behalf of Pro Sport Development across the country. In 2018, Pro Sport Development was awarded by the International Olympic Committee in recognition of their outstanding work in the area of sport for all.