by Anna Kessel
Listening to Fiona and Jo, I can’t help but feel my heart sink, just a little. I am full of admiration for their get up and go, I’m just not sure I could ever emulate it. Are we saying this is the only solution? Learn to play golf? Shoot? Be one of the boys? It could all start to feel a bit forced. Like those US websites designed to help women talk sport around the nation’s water coolers – Heels & Helmets: Ladies, Get in the Game and Win! or Talk Sports Like a Pro: 99 Secrets to Becoming a Sports Goddess. Maybe these initiatives have worked wonders for some women’s careers, but if I’m honest I find them a bit weird. Like ‘fake it till you make it’ guides on how to bag a boyfriend. Can’t we just be ourselves?
Fiona sympathizes. ‘A Muslim woman said the same thing to me after a presentation I did recently. She said, “Do you know, I feel really depressed now. I knew I was stuffed because I was female and a minority, I’m further stuffed because I’m Muslim and I wear a hijab, and now I’m doubly stuffed because I don’t like sport. I haven’t got a frickin’ chance.” I thought that was a really great thing she said, because it’s up to great leaders to ensure they’re thinking about the diversity of their client base. Your spending should reflect your existing client base but also what your client base hopes to be like in ten years’ time.’
Currently that’s just not happening enough. Fiona talks about a day out at Lord’s Cricket Ground recently where she counted twenty-seven corporate boxes, approximately twenty people per box, and just two women. ‘It’s in those boxes that the networking happens, people getting slightly tipsy, having a laugh. But men naturally invite other men; they need to start inviting women and women need to start forcing themselves to go.’ But what if you don’t like sport? You’re not familiar with cricket? You’re worried about being quizzed on batting averages? ‘In all honesty, half of them aren’t really watching the sport anyway; they’re getting drunk, eating lunch and bonding. I don’t like F1 but I still loved the day out, it was fabulous. You’ve got to view networking as, “I’m going to meet interesting people,” not, “Oh my God, I don’t want to go.” You’ve got to have a plan: “Right, I’ll do two conferences a year and four away days.” You can’t do all of it, but make sure you’re there for some of it.’
Sue Unerman, advertising guru and chief strategy officer for MediaCom, tells me the same thing. She doesn’t much like sport, and she often turns down corporate invitations to attend sporting events (‘I haven’t got to where I am today by going to golf days,’ she quips). And yet, on her wall, there are yellow Post-it notes about the ‘Fosbury Flop’ and British cycling guru Dave Brailsford. I don’t get it?
‘I use sporting analogies at work,’ explains Sue, a rare example of a woman at the top of her field who has spent many years working part-time. ‘I’ve been doing it for fifteen years because you get immediate understanding, particularly from men. There’s nothing more effective than a football analogy. You could spend hours researching how to sell an idea with statistics and charts, or you could say, “who do we want to beat, Barcelona or Fulham?” and that will get heads nodding in a meeting. I’m speaking their language.’ Because she doesn’t watch sport Sue gets her analogies from her partner, Mark, a huge West Ham fan. She explains the situation at work, and asks him for a comparable example from the world of sport. The analogies she gives me are so illuminating that I find myself nodding and grinning, even though I know absolutely nothing about advertising, multimillion-pound billings, or how to make a profit in business. When she talks sport, I – a business ignoramus – actually understand what she’s on about. What’s more, the process feels enjoyable.
‘I remember I had one client who was incredibly analytical. He obsessed over his style of thinking and was reluctant to try anything else. But I wanted him to throw that approach out for the day, so in our meeting I put up a picture of Barcelona losing to Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final in 2012. I said that at that moment, losing to Chelsea at the Nou Camp, Barcelona fans the world over were screaming at their TVs, “just put it in the mixer!” I didn’t actually know what that meant, but Mark had explained to me that Barcelona were famous for their analytical style of play, and that sometimes stymies the element of surprise that wins you the Champions League semi-final. The thing is that people really love that you’re using language they understand, instead of advertising jargon. I also have a Tiger Woods one which is brilliantly effective. It deals with the debate about whether companies should invest in innovation, or focus on profits. I say, “So if Tiger Woods earns 10 per cent of his salary from golf competitions, and 90 per cent of his income from sponsorship, where should he invest his hours?” That one’s even more pertinent since his fall from grace . . .’
Sue was put off sport at an early age by a golf-obsessed grandmother (‘she’d make me caddy for her every weekend at the golf club in Potters Bar’, one of the first set up specifically for the Jewish community who weren’t allowed in clubs elsewhere) and by always being last pick for teams at school. ‘My experience of sport was to fail,’ she says. Sue believes it had a lasting impact on her ability to work within a group. ‘I didn’t understand about teams early on in my career. I was a perfectionist and focused on how great my work was. But I learned, and what I discovered was that I was so competitive it was just all being sublimated. I eventually learned to put my effort into getting the team to win. And the pleasure of doing that together is incredible, while the comfort of failing together is immense. I’m only sorry I didn’t learn it at school. Teamwork in sport is about understanding that it doesn’t matter how lovely someone is; if they drop the baton they’ve let you down. Similarly you shouldn’t care if someone is an arsehole so long as they deliver in their role. It’s the neutrality of sport, it’s all about the performance.’
I can relate to what Sue is saying because it has taken me years to embrace being part of a team. As a child at school I hated it; I’d inwardly groan when we had to work in groups, I didn’t know how to make the most of the different skill sets around the table and I would withdraw and let others make the decisions. Like Sue, I was continually drawn to personalities over practicalities. If I liked someone I wanted to work with them, regardless of whether they were great or useless at the task they were given. Twenty-five years down the line and I’ve finally learned to love – and understand – teamwork. With Women in Football, the industry networking organization that I chair, I feel so proud of our collective achievements. I get a thrill seeing others excel in their strengths, which in turn makes us all stronger. But I can’t help wondering if I could have learned all this a long time ago and saved myself a lot of internal angst and inefficient working. And, more to the point, how are we going to ensure the next generation of young women don’t fall into the same trap?
Even if the government does suddenly bring in a raft of changes to school sport that ensures my daughter won’t miss out on a sporting skill set, what about the millions of women for whom it is already too late? Do they really have to learn to shoot and play golf? Fake it to make it? Are cricket, football – even paintball – the only options to help with team bonding and productivity? Isn’t there another way to reap the benefits of sport in the workplace, without alienating those who have never played – or enjoyed playing – sport before? I know I’ve been guilty of routinely turning down pretty much every sporting opportunity that’s ever come my way in my career, except for maybe tenpin bowling at an office Christmas party. That’s where Georgie Bullen’s story comes in. The GB captain for Goalball, a Paralympic sport for blind and visually impaired teams, she takes her sport into workplaces across the country, blindfolding employees and getting them to try relay races and Goalball drills. ‘It’s much more effective than falling backwards into your colleagues’ arms,’ says Georgie, who believes that depriving employees of one of their key senses – sight – teaches people how to communicate better and, ultimately, trust each other.14
If I’m honest, when I hear about sportspeople setting up businesses to complement
their sporting careers I tend to feel a bit sceptical. They’ll put their name to a swim club, a nutrition plan or sports product, and it can all feel a bit half-hearted, something to help the cash flow. Georgie’s story is very different. She’s only twenty-one and she’s extraordinary. Her business, supported by the Prince’s Trust and the Royal National Institute for the Blind, is genuinely helpful to workplaces; it also creates awareness of visual impairment in a playful way as employees get to try out simulation spectacles recreating varying degrees of blindness. But Georgie doesn’t shy away from some of the hard-hitting facts about life with a visual impairment in the UK, either. I was gobsmacked when she told me that two-thirds of working-age blind and VI people in this country are unemployed. She relays the story of her GB teammate’s blind husband. ‘He’s been job-hunting for years; he can’t get anything. He’s got a degree, he’s very smart. It’s not through lack of trying. He started out wanting to use his degree, but ended up applying for any admin job he could find. I really want to help that. I went to mainstream schools and all I needed to be included was to make sure worksheets were enlarged type.’
Through Paralympic sport Georgie found life. It’s as simple as that. At her mainstream school she was sidelined in PE lessons, the teachers told her she was no good, and she was always the last in the line when it came to picking teams. This was a pretty confusing state of affairs for a girl who grew up playing sport with her brothers in the back garden and saw it as a normal thing to do. Georgie had wanted to study PE for GCSE, but was discouraged by her teachers who felt she wouldn’t be able to cope. Little did they know that she would go on to captain her country at the greatest sporting event the UK has ever hosted, London 2012. You have to wonder how many other, less determined, kids were left behind because they did not receive the encouragement or opportunity to take part in sport. I know many adult women who often reflect, with genuine curiosity, on how talented they might have been at sport – had they only been given a proper chance.
Georgie’s story makes me angry. The upshot, of course, is that she found Paralympic sport and, surrounded by other athletes with visual impairments, she instantly discovered a support network of friends who could laugh and rage about all the crazy things they have in common through their disability. Like being chased down the street by an angry stranger convinced that they were in pursuit of someone who had stolen a guide dog. ‘People just don’t understand visual impairment, they think you’re either blind or you’re fully sighted. A lot of people struggle to understand that disability is anything other than being in a wheelchair.’ Sometimes it’s the everyday comments that get to her. ‘Like when people realize you’re visually impaired and they say, “Oh, that’s a such a shame because you’re so pretty.”’ Georgie laughs. I am speechless.
What’s so clever about Georgie’s business is how it uses Paralympic sport to teach able-bodied people something important, to improve their capacity in their everyday jobs. This is such a significant inversion of the usual narrative where mainstream society helps Paralympic sport, or disabled people in general, prompted by some sort of moral obligation. Instead, Georgie’s scheme is about what disability can teach the rest of us. And how incredibly powerful those lessons can be. Because while the Paralympics are all good, the English Federation of Disability Sport says two-thirds of disabled people don’t want to take part in segregated sport; they want to join in with everyone else. And even for those interested in pursuing an elite career in sport, the Paralympics represent only a small section of the disabled community because of the limited number of classifications available. The world is so set up for able-bodied people that, from the workplace to our discussions around health, we routinely exclude anyone with a disability.
And what if you’re actively banned from taking part in sport in your workplace? It sounds extreme, but that’s the situation that sports minister Tracey Crouch found herself in as an up-and-coming MP. We meet in her offices, opposite Parliament Square. She is several months pregnant but hardly shows, her blouse neatly tucked into a pencil skirt, while I negotiate my own enormous-feeling pregnancy bump to reach for a mug of tea. Astonishingly, she is the first Tory minister ever to take maternity leave.
Tracey grew up playing every sport under the sun, even when teachers in the playground told her not to. ‘You’re not allowed to play,’ they’d say, ‘go and do something else.’ She coached a girls’ football team for nine years alongside her political career, and follows pretty much every other sport. She’s a rare example of a sports minister who can take on the media’s dreaded inauguration sports quiz without her advisors breaking into a sweat.
I first heard about Tracey when she complained of being excluded from the parliamentary football team, in 2011. I tentatively ask about it now, wondering if since she has become the sports minister she would prefer not to go over old ground. But her response and feeling on the matter seem as strong as ever.
‘By the time I got elected in 2010 the FA were running the team and felt it was necessary to adhere to all FA rules, and of course they ban mixed football over a certain age. I was unable to play for any team that the FA coordinated. That meant the parliamentary team but also the teams that are put out at party conference. It’s all to do with the referee and insurance. Although many of the professional referees I’ve spoken to have said they’d be happy to do it,’ she adds. At the Conservative Party conference the team decided to allow Tracey to play, and forfeited the FA’s financial assistance with kit and referees. That’s a heavy burden to carry for one player. It seems a ridiculous state of affairs, particularly now that Tracey is sports minister. Surely the FA cannot continue to stick to their archaic stance and deny the minister a place on the team? There must be a solution to this? ‘I don’t think there is one unless the FA is more flexible in its attitude to running a parliamentary football team,’ sighs Tracey. ‘The way it’s run can be taken a bit too seriously. The players on the team say I’d be very welcome to take part. When you’ve got people visiting parliament there will be ladies who want to come along and play. But I think the FA probably just need to take themselves a little bit less seriously on this issue. And until they do that there’s no way forward.’ She folds her arms in her lap, but I am irate. ‘But Tracey, you are the sports minister! This is insane!’ I say. ‘Yeah,’ says Tracey, ‘I’ll just have to withdraw all their funding or something . . .’ she jokes. Tracey says she agrees that sport is an important part of networking and the workplace and that she doesn’t feel women should have to miss out on it. ‘I don’t feel I’ve personally missed out on networking or engagement with my colleagues, but I think people should always have the opportunity to participate in a sport if they want to.’
So what is she doing about the next generation? Tracey is far more positive about the future than I am, reflecting on how opportunities for young women have improved since she was a girl. I suppose it is the job of a politician to be optimistic; I only wish there was closer collaboration between the various government departments. As Tracey says, ‘There’s always room for improvement [in school sport] but it’s not within my department’s scope to monitor it . . .’ Thankfully, Tracey’s initiative of a new sports strategy focuses heavily on grass roots, and ropes in multiple departments to consult. ‘We are looking at all age groups; we know that older people who are physically active are going to be less of a drain on the NHS because physical activity reduces loneliness and isolation, so it’s good for people to be involved.’ Best of all, the 2016 strategy targets children from five years old and upwards. This is huge and welcome progress, particularly considering that the old approach only sought to encourage young people into sport once they had turned fourteen.
And while she’s a total sports nut, Tracey says she has learned to love Zumba, which makes me warm to her. ‘I was a real sceptic to start with,’ she says, ‘not least because I have no coordination for dancing, but the Zumba class I used to go to was held in a village hall where the instructor turned off th
e lights and only illuminated the stage, so it didn’t matter if I was the person at the back that looked like a muppet because no one could see you. I’d come away sweating more at Zumba than I ever did at football. And you can do it by yourself.’
From doing Zumba in semi-darkness, to the ever-evolving workplace. A coffee with EY Head of Sponsorship Tom Kingsley proves to be a refreshing conversation as he talks about rounds of golf being replaced by walking lunch meetings, or cycle rides up Box Hill. He says much of this is down to companies coming under pressure to be more inclusive – and with women rising through the ranks there are new interests to embrace. This, in turn, could have an important knock-on effect for women’s sport – a point that Fiona highlights. If golf tournaments now feel stuffy and ubiquitous, then how about sponsoring women’s rugby, or rowing, or football? Female staff members are more likely to be interested in joining a sporting environment if women are the focus, and it has huge corporate social responsibility benefits for the company at a time when ‘femvertising’ is all the rage in the commercial sector.
But the change isn’t just about women. It’s also about men. One of the best things Tom tells me is that, with two young children at home, he doesn’t want to miss out on family time because of corporate networking responsibilities. So if he’s invited to a Champions League game midweek, he’d rather be at home, get the kids to bed, then pop downstairs and watch it on the telly. Or if it’s a sporting event at the weekend, he wants to make sure it doesn’t eat into family time – so he’ll ask, can he bring his wife? Or his two boys? His family are Liverpool supporters and he says he’ll always ask if he can bring his sons with him to a game. He’ll swap the corporate hospitality for regular tickets, and then nip upstairs to the box at half-time for a business coffee. He’s aware that the older generation might not be comfortable with all this, but as a dad with young kids he’s got a strong sense of what kind of environment he wants to work in, and how it can be better for everybody.