Q: How many men in suits does it take to open a new national sports arena?
A: One to cut the ribbon, and 12 others to not notice anything wrong with the picture.
That may be a lame joke – but then, so too was the photo released yesterday to mark the opening of the new Sport Ireland National Indoor Arena in Abbotstown, Dublin.
“If I tweet that this picture is odd, is Twitter gonna give out to me?” three-time Olympian Derval O’Rourke asked, accompanied by an emoji of a monkey hiding its eyes.
Feast your eyes on that again. Number of suits: 13. Number of women: 0. Number of actual athletes: 0.
The reaction from Twitter was swift, and justifiably angry.
As the comedian PJ Gallagher said, there is plenty of diversity in the photo. There were grey ties, red ties, light blue ties, mid-blue ties and navy blue ties. There was even one lilac tie.
More depressing, even, than the sea of grey and mid-blue is that not one of the 13 seems to have noticed anything wrong with the picture. Or if they did, they do not appear to have objected, proving that all it takes for sexism to triumph is for a whole lot of men – and their various minders and handlers – to stand around gurning in their suits, and say nothing.
Disconcertingly, this was one of two photos this week that offered a wall of suits as a visual illustration of just how far women still have to go to achieve equality.
The other piece of "manwashing" emanated from the Oval Office, where US president Donald Trump was signing three executive orders – including the one commonly known as the "global gag rule", which stops funding to NGOs overseas if they perform abortions. He, too, was surrounded by white men in suits.
“If you’re wondering what the patriarchy looks like,” wrote Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti.
Back in Abbottstown, it is not that there weren’t any females available to participate in the event: video footage shows girls playing basketball and taking part in gymnastics displays.
Better still, they could have invited some of the top Irish athletes – male and female – who will be using the facilities to train to take part. The pentathlete Natalya Coyle – who came 7th in the Rio Olympics – tweeted that she was there training yesterday, as did Dublin U16 Ladies Footballer Jess Keating.
Then there is the long list of associations with an involvement in the consultation process: the Irish Sport Council, the Olympic Council of Ireland, the Federation of Irish Sport, the Paralympic Council of Ireland, Athletics Ireland, the Irish Amateur Boxing Association.
Did none of women working for any of those organisations have a role in the development of the arena? (And if not, why not?) Failing all of that, five of the 13 members of the board of the National Sports Campus Development Authority are women.
This isn’t about window-dressing, or placating women. And it isn’t about a single, isolated oversight or misguided PR. For a start, it wasn’t just that one photo: I trawled through coverage of the event and spotted no women in any of the photos used. If you squint hard enough, you can see a few distant ponytails in the background – but that, if the photos are to be believed, is the extent of the female involvement in the facility.
The reason the image rankled is that it is emblematic of the way women are still sidelined in public life, and in sport particularly.
One the one side, there are those who will argue that women’s sport does not get the same visibility or funding, because there simply isn’t sufficient public interest.
On the other, there’s the view that if it started getting a fairer share of coverage and public money, it could attract more supporters, and more investment in sponsorship – which would in turn beget more interest.
Figures released last year showed that only 38 per cent of Irish women are sports fans. I’d guess a large part of that is that, when they’re growing up, they simply don’t see enough people who look like them on the playing field. It’s the old adage that if you don’t see it, you won’t want to be it.
Whatever your views on the reasons for low levels of female participation, this is not simply an issue of equality or fairness: it is also an urgent public health concern. A 2013 study by ESRI and the Irish Sports Council found that while 88 per cent of primary schoolchildren engage in regular sporting activity, with no significant gender difference, girls are more likely to drop out of sport in secondary school.
The report found that children who do participate in sport typically do better in their Leaving Cert.
Allied with Ireland's alarming obesity rates, there is clearly an urgent need to get more girls and young women involved and actively participating in sport. A study published in the Lancet last year claimed that Ireland was the fattest nation in Europe, alongside Britain. Irish women have the third highest body mass index in Europe – and by 2025, an estimated 37 percent of Irish women will be obese.
So far, many of the attempts to attract women into sport have been hamfisted, at best. Remember the English Football Association’s secret weapon, unveiled last year – pink whistles, scented bibs and regular phone breaks? No? Believe me, it’s best forgotten.
Other attempts have been more successful: the Ladies Gaelic Football Association is piloting a programme called Gaelic4Teens, and Lidl is currently sponsoring women’s Gaelic football.
But there’s a cheaper, even more effective way to attract young women to sport. And that is to keep reminding them what’s possible.
We should be taking every opportunity to get our female sporting stars – and our male ones too, though they don’t suffer from the same lack of visibility – more involved in public life. We should celebrate them at every opportunity. And what better opportunity than the opening of a world class national training facility?
