Eat. Sweat. Play

by Anna Kessel

  Out in the real world, though, how many women are there like Kelly, Michelle, Justine, Eniola, Claire or Katherine? Hardly any of my schoolfriends played sport at a serious level. Of the ones who did, most had quit by the time puberty hit. And thirty years on, with PE so low on the list of priorities for schoolchildren, particularly girls, that pattern is not likely to change anytime soon. Do the people in charge of the national curriculum even know that sport can positively affect a woman’s future career prospects? Do they ever speak to the Department for Work and Pensions? Do they have a joined-up approach? Because all the rhetoric around engaging young girls in physical activity and ‘never mind if it’s Zumba rather than, say, cricket’ doesn’t really cut the mustard. We don’t know if Zumba is going to make you more competitive, and EY’s research doesn’t cover yoga, or Pilates, or aerobics. Of course there’s an argument to say that all of those things could potentially offer women similar leadership and workplace skills based around commitment, discipline and hard work. But if it’s not the same, and if we’re not getting any closer to generating a female workforce with a grounding in sport, then what on earth can we do about it?

  For a start, sport needs to be taken more seriously as a platform for creating strong, ambitious and independent-minded young women. Tanni Grey-Thompson thinks sport should have its own government department, away from the ‘culture and media’ bit, with a minister apiece for sport and physical activity. That’s because, despite being hugely influential and potentially life-changing, sport is still seen as a bit of a joke; within newspapers the sports desk is often referred to as ‘the toy department’. But sport, particularly for women, has always been so much more than that. It’s revolutionary, empowering, radical, and political. It’s at the front line of change, and if we want the workplace to change for women – from equal pay to maternity rights – we cannot afford to ignore sport’s role here.

  Think of the one moment the recent Suffragette film would not have considered excluding from its narrative: the story of Emily Davison who slipped underneath the barrier at Epsom and into the path of the king’s horse on Derby day in 1913. Emily was an experienced militant activist; she knew what a powerful platform this sporting event was – attended by royalty, high society, journalists and film crews. Her death, captured on camera, remains one of the most enduring images in history of women’s struggle for equality. Time and again the suffragettes used sport to raise the profile of their cause, from replacing the flags at King George’s own private golf course at Balmoral with suffragette colours and handwritten slogans demanding votes for women, to attacking the then prime minister, Herbert Asquith, as he played a round of golf while on holiday at Elgin. All around the country golf courses were targeted, chemicals poured onto the turf or sections of the greens dug out to spell the slogans: ‘Justice before sport’ and ‘Votes for women’. Cricket pavilions and boathouses were set alight, bowls clubs and grandstands at Crystal Palace and Blackburn’s grounds were also attacked. There was even an attempt to burn down Wimbledon, home of the All England Lawn Tennis Association. Why? As the periodical American Golfer pointed out at the time, golf was already a popular ‘ladies’ sport’, so wasn’t the movement counterproductive to the rights of their own sex? The suffragettes thought not, and Emmeline Pankhurst publicly encouraged these acts for the disruption they caused to what was often seen as the inner sanctum of male bonding and recreation.

  In some ways, not much has changed. I have a friend who works in finance. Her boss is middle-aged and keeps a small logbook on his desk. In it he notes down the scores of the young men in the office who play squash. He likes to keep track of who is winning and who is losing. He doesn’t play himself, or go to watch them; it is simply an interest maintained from afar. It’s his way of assessing the young bucks in the office. A creepy kind of machismo, marvelling over the athletic and competitive abilities of junior male staff, running his eye over future candidates for promotion. Or there’s another friend, a TV producer, who remarks, ‘It never ceases to amaze me how every time I ask two guys in TV how they know each other, the answer I get is always football. They play football together, or they are into online gaming together.’

  Without doubt, sport’s influence over the workplace is as ubiquitous as the office tea break. Whether it’s sweepstakes during the World Cup, or women being invited to act as ‘cheerleaders’ at office football matches (as a male colleague quipped to another friend of mine, ‘FA rules do state that women and men cannot engage on the same field of play . . .’), sport has had a place at work for decades.

  Take the example of the Bank of England’s annual sports day, also known as Governor’s Day, which takes place every July at the plush grounds of the Bank of England Sports Club, Roehampton. It is the biggest career-networking opportunity in the bank’s social calendar, when the Governor and his most senior staff turn out to mingle with the minions. High-profile sports stars are recruited to hand out prizes, and even to play against the staff. It is billed as an ‘inclusive’ and ‘family-friendly’ event, with a funfair and food tents, a day at which spouses and children are welcome. So far so jolly, but flick through media reports and the focus seems to be on the all-male cricket and football matches taking place between male staff, plus a sprinkling of male sporting celebrities. At former Governor Sir Mervyn King’s farewell sports day in 2013, for example, there was an all-male cricket match and a star-studded five-a-side game between Sir Merv and a selection of the 1982 European Cup-winning Aston Villa players. Turns out Merv was a big Villa fan and fancied playing against his heroes, as did his grandson and some of his colleagues. ‘So what happens if you’re female and work at the Bank of England?’ a friend of mine asked one of the employees. ‘Well, you just come along and watch from the side,’ she replied.

  Some might say this is no surprise for a 320-year-old institution in which senior staff are still attended to by doormen in pink tailcoats and top hats. Or that, at the height of the economic recession in 2009, the Bank advised female employees how not to dress like a prostitute. In case you’re wondering, apparently ankle chains should be avoided at all costs, but high heels and lipstick are essential. I’m so glad they were thinking about these things. Imagine trying to tackle the financial crisis without the right shoes on.

  Not wanting to judge without having sampled the sports day myself, I put in a request to attend Governor’s Day. Sadly they have a strict no-media rule, but the press officer did assure me that things have changed significantly since the arrival of Governor Mark Carney in 2013. For one thing, Carney has abolished the game of cricket as the centrepiece of the day, instead preferring rounders and football as examples of more ‘inclusive’ sports. While traditionalists were up in arms over the decision, many say that Carney’s modernizing of such an archaic event is symptomatic of a trend happening across the financial sector.

  A similar shift – from traditional sport to the sport of the masses – had an effect on politics in the 1990s, in the form of football. Tony Blair and New Labour’s ascent to power coincided with a period of laddism that had at its heart the re-popularization of football – from the launch of the Premier League to Nick Hornby’s novel Fever Pitch and England hosting the Euros and obsessing over Gazza. It was a period I remember well as a seventeen-year-old, as I perched on the kitchen counter on a hot June day, listening intently to BBC 5 Live on a tiny radio, praying that the Czech Republic would beat Germany in the final. They didn’t. It was a seminal summer for me in terms of my relationship to sport. After seventeen years of never quite fitting in with the rest of the population – growing up with a mix of cultures from my parents, bookshelves full of Jung and Milan Kundera, living in a council flat and not knowing what a Yorkshire pudding was – finally I was hitting the mainstream. Football bridged the divide, the common language that could unite us all, across fashion divides, ethnicity, religion and even gender. England was going football crazy. And I was buying in, massively. The ‘Three Lions’ (Football’s Coming Home
) anthem was on everyone’s lips, and for once singing about a nation didn’t feel like ugly nationalism. In its new guise, football was more acceptable than ever, and influencing some of the most unlikely institutions.

  That change in football’s status and influence cannot be underestimated. And so it was that an electorate watched as Tony Blair played head tennis with then Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan at the 1995 Labour Party conference, and decided that this was the man to lead the nation. Blair even took advice from former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson on leadership. (‘What would you do if your best player won’t do what you want him to and just does his own thing?’ Blair recalls asking, in his memoirs. ‘Chuck him out of the team,’ was Ferguson’s alleged reply.) When Blair and Brown wanted to show a united front following rumours of ongoing disagreements, they arranged a photo opportunity in which both men sat watching football on the TV and drinking beer. The whole party was so steeped in football that if you wanted to get ahead, you needed to be on the bandwagon.

  How did this new dynamic affect women in the political world? In 2008 the Financial Times’s political editor George Parker wrote an eye-opening article titled ‘Power Games’, charting football’s role in politics. His assertion, that football made the Labour Party something akin to a Sunday league team outing, is both fascinating and frightening. What if you weren’t a football fan? How were you supposed to get on? ‘Football has been a thread throughout Labour’s decade in power,’ he wrote. ‘It greases the wheels of politics; it is a networking tool; it is a political message.’ Parker described how even under the leadership of Gordon Brown – a passionate Raith Rovers fan – football was central to working processes. ‘Brown regularly mapped out economic policy over football and pizza in the Grosvenor House Hotel apartment of Geoffrey Robinson, a fellow Treasury minister and football fanatic,’ he wrote.13 He details how football came to exert such an influence on the corridors of power in Westminster that civil servants and journalists attempted to ingratiate themselves by swotting up on the football scores from the weekend just so that they could make small talk with the ministers come Monday morning.

  Parker’s specific focus was a team made up of New Labour employees, called ‘Demon Eyes’ (a reference to the Tories’ controversial general election poster of 1997 in which Blair was depicted with devilish red eyes). In its football incarnation, Demon Eyes was a bunch of middle-class Islingtonians who trained on Highbury Fields and competed in the tough Thames League (twice winning promotion, and a Division One title in 2001). ‘We had a reputation as a fairly unpleasant team to play against,’ recalls Andy Burnham, now shadow home secretary. ‘We all backed each other up quite a lot. It could get quite fruity.’ One of Blair’s aides is alleged to have got involved in a punch-up, and Demon Eyes even had their own war cry: ‘Winners!’ they would yell. The list of names involved in that team reads like a Who’s Who of politics: from Burnham to James Purnell, Ed Balls to David Miliband.

  It all sounds distinctly laddish, a theme that didn’t escape some women at the time. In 1998, Helen Wilkinson, co-founder of the Blairite think tank Demos, publicly denounced the Labour government’s ‘new lad culture’ in a column for the New Statesman. She revealed how brainstorming sessions at Chequers regularly ended up with advisers playing five-a-side football on the lawns. ‘This “new lad culture” seems harmless enough and is justified in terms of team bonding,’ she said. ‘The problem is that team bonding too readily turns to male bonding. The old boys’ network may have progressed from golf to football, but the fundamental rules are the same.’

  Unless, of course, you were a woman daring enough to join them – like Jo Gibbons. A long-time Labour staffer, who went on to work for Tony Blair for many years, Gibbons is now a board member of Women in Sport. She played on the women’s Number 10 Downing Street team (‘we only ever had one fixture, against Buckingham Palace women’s team, and they were terrifying, all ex-RAF and military’), but she also forced herself to join in with the Sunday morning kickarounds on Highbury Fields that many of the Demon Eyes team players took part in, one of a very few women who did.

  Despite no background in playing football – which was banned for girls when she was growing up – Jo was passionate about the game. Demon Eyes was an all men’s team of course, but in those Sunday morning kickabouts with influential Labour Party rising stars she saw football as an obvious way of furthering her career. ‘I immediately recognized the opportunities involved,’ she says now. ‘Through football I built relationships, it was part of my personal networking experience, no doubt about it. A female friend of mine was also a Labour Party press officer but her relationships weren’t as strong as mine, I’m sure that’s because of football.’ I can’t help but admire her gutsiness in joining the team, and the strong career plan she had in the back of her mind even then. Jo describes an era in which politics was ‘alpha male’ and populated by ‘hard-drinking, football-loving blokes’. If you wanted to get on, you did well to fit in. Her sister, formerly a marketing executive, had a similar experience in her industry – learning to play golf in order to take out clients and strengthen her relationships. So is this the takeaway message for women in the twenty-first century?

  Fiona Hathorn, Managing Director of Women on Boards in the UK, an organization pushing to change the gender balance across some of the most powerful boardrooms in the country, echoes Jo’s experiences. Fiona learned about sport and business the hard way. As a fund manager in the 1990s she noticed that her male colleagues were forever going on golf or shooting days, or spending corporate time watching Formula One or football or Wimbledon. Although Fiona didn’t come from a sporty family, a word in her ear from her female boss encouraged her to get to grips with the basics. ‘My boss told me I must make time to network because relationships are key to speaking to the right stockbrokers and getting the best information first. It was all who you knew, and did they call you first. She said: you need to get out there.’ So Fiona learned to play golf, and to shoot, and to do just about anything involving sport. Because sport, she says, is the preferred means of business networking. And networking in business is the gospel.

  According to leadership business guru Herminia Ibarra, there are three main types of network to know about.

  1) Operational: that’s the people around you in your workplace. ‘Women are normally very good at those relationships,’ says Fiona, ‘although not usually outside their own department. And that’s exactly where you need to network in order to get up the ladder.’

  2) Personal: that could be anything from your social circle, to how you interact when picking the kids up from school. Fiona believes that men naturally champion their achievements in their social circles, talking about work at the school gate, at football, on a night out with friends. ‘It’s much harder for women,’ says Fiona. ‘For example, when I’d pick my kids up from school I had to choose between making friends with the other mums at the school gate, or making a beeline for the dad who works at Deutsche Bank so I can network with him. How judged will I be? You’d never see a guy worrying about that. And that’s very stereotypical about the way we are still bringing girls up – to please.’

  3) Strategic: which is all about conferences and corporate days out. ‘Sport plays a big part in these,’ says Fiona. ‘If you’re in the office and your team is obsessed with cricket and you don’t know anything about cricket you’re out of the group, your relationships possibly aren’t going to be as strong. Those people who tend to do well blur the work–life boundaries.’

  That’s because business is essentially far more about personal relationships than we like to believe. Think of The Wolf of Wall Street, in which Jordan Belfort assembles a team of complete losers to run what ends up being a multimillion-dollar company. But those losers are not any old losers, they’re his friends. Now we all like to accept that the best people for the job get the job. Or that headhunting is all about searching out expertise. But we know that’s not always the case. And that’s bec
ause we’re human beings. We like personal connections. We like things to laugh about together, we like to feel comfortable in each other’s company.

  Fiona believes that sharing sports experiences can break down barriers to personal connection, and that’s why they’re so valued in the business sector. ‘It’s all the funny incidents that happen that create close relationships. Like one time I went karting, and I’m only small. They didn’t have a boiler suit for a woman so I was put in a huge outfit for a big guy. I had to roll the sleeves up and the legs up and everyone was just killing themselves laughing from looking at me. But I came second in the go-karting because I’m very light, and I drive very aggressively, braking and accelerating at the same time. And months later I’d be travelling the Asian markets and bump into people who would say, “Oh! Do you remember that stupid suit! That was so funny!” and we’d laugh about it together. And what I’ve seen is people being given job offers through those relationships.’