Women working in the AFL say the industry's pervading "blokey culture" stunts their progress, and question whether the game's leaders genuinely want to fix the problems.
These are among the preliminary findings from a pioneering three-year affirmative action plan initiated by the Richmond Football Club, with backing from the Australian Sports Commission and AFL.
The first public paper from the project is a 56-page report with excerpts from almost 60 interviews with men and women in football who participated on the basis of anonymity.
The report captures a sense of cynicism about how gender discrimination in football – which has a 44 per cent female fan base – has typically been addressed, and a limited vision among the men interviewed about how to change it.
"On the whole, men approached the discussion from the perspective of how to assist women to 'fit in' to the existing environment, rather than how to change that environment," the report says.
The paper documents how women in football have been adversely affected by "stubborn, unthinking attitudes and cultural habits that created resistance to progress". One female interviewee described how she felt written off in her workplace after a male colleague characterised her as a "groupie". Women with children who wanted more opportunity in their AFL careers reported feeling especially limited .
"The AFL game has moved beyond overt, blatant sexism on most counts, and what pervades today is something much more subtle, nuanced and culturally ingrained, but deeply felt, widely experienced and prohibitive to women's progress nevertheless," the report finds.
While the "Gender Equity: What Will It Take To Be The Best" paper, co-authored by Dr Pippa Grange and Paul Oliver, documents unanimous agreement from the participants that things have never been better for females working in football, it highlights enduring barriers and says change has been "glacially slow".
The AFL has previously acknowledged its failure to meaningfully improve the status and role of women in football – particularly in the most senior echelons of the game. Andrew Demetriou used his last speech as competition chief executive to acknowledge the fact.
The Grange-Oliver report cites "weight of numbers" as a catalyst for increasing female involvement and influence in the AFL and sport more broadly. In 2014 at the AFL and its 18 clubs, women fill 22 of the 148 club board positions and at the AFL, Dorothy Hisgrove is the lone female representative on a 10-member executive.
As general manager of People, Customer and Community, Hisgrove has been leading the league's new gender strategy since she started just over a year ago and has full backing from new chief executive Gillon McLachlan.
Dr Grange, who produced a review of Australian swimming after the London Olympics that revealed a "toxic culture" in the national ranks, previously worked for the AFL Players Association and several AFL clubs. She and Oliver, who has previously worked for the Australian Human Rights Commission, will oversee the implementation of the report's recommendations at Richmond, which has committed to taking radical affirmative action over the next two years to improve the staff gender mix. The club's motivation, in part, is that it makes good business sense to engage and promote more women.
The results of the groundbreaking project will be documented and shared across Australian sport.
