Women & girls are still fighting for fair access and basic necessities in community sporting clubs across Victoria. It’s time to lift our game.

If the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup has shown us anything, it’s that the level of support has skyrocketed for women in professional sport, especially in spaces that were once considered male dominated. Unfortunately, the same level of support is not reflected in many community sporting clubs across Australia. Thankfully, things are changing, but we still have a way to go.

The Office for Women in Sport and Recreation (OWSR) within the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions (DJSIR) were seeking a video production agency to produce its second Fair Access Policy video campaign. The main objective was to raise awareness and highlight a sense of urgency to make fair access a priority for community sporting clubs and the entire sporting sector across Victoria. We set out to achieve this by addressing the existing barriers in community sport, through unscripted interviews that capture the lived experiences of women from different walks of life.Through the introduction of allies in this space, we would also highlight the ripple effect these barriers are having on women and girls in the community and how some sporting clubs are tackling these issues in real time, in order to create tangible change and a cultural shift in community sport.

Finally, in order to break this cycle, we believed it was important to also touch on the unconscious bias exhibited by some of the adult participants who have been conditioned by old school mentalities in community sport. This would be balanced out by the refreshing views of young children, who are yet to be affected by societal norms or gender stereotypes, further highlighting that gender bias is a behaviour that is learnt over time, and that we all have the power to change this narrative by breaking the cycle before it starts.