How Can We Close the Gender Gap in Sailing?

When you take a glance around your local sailing club, you will find that there are mostly men. The “Women in Sailing Strategic Review” by the World Sailing Trust back up this first impression. Of the 4,500 respondents to the survey, 80 per cent of female and 56 per cent of male sailors believe that gender balance is an issue in the sport. Sailing has always been male-dominated, and that gender gap already shows at a young age.

"What we found is that girls finish CANSail 1, maybe 2, and then drop out of the programme at the age of ten or eleven. "Usually, only one or two girls per class continue sailing," says Marjolyn van der Hart, director of community programmes at Toronto's Ashbridge's Bay Yacht Club (ABYC) in the podcast “Sports Talk with John Hancock.”

Van der Hart is trying to understand the reason why girls in junior sailing drop out of the sport at a higher rate than boys. It is often presumed that the sport is too physically demanding and that female sailors are not strong enough to sail the big boats.

But when the whole sailing community expects less of women than it does of men on the water, that affects how they are treated on the boat. Being overlooked, underrated, and condescended to becomes normal for female sailors. This difference in how girls and women are treated on the boat is driving the gender gap in sailing, not a difference in natural strength. Those common stereotypes can affect girls who come into the sport.

When ABYC member Clara Gravely started sailing, she enjoyed it and felt comfortable in her mixed group of boys and girls. But at the same time, she describes it as an "intimidating environment," as there were often certain rules about what the girls should be doing on a sailing boat.

“The boys would always think they were the ones that should be driving the boat and the girls should be riding on as the crew,” remembers Gravely. “I often would shy away from driving the boat, because the boys would immediately jump on it and take that role.”

Like Gravely, 59 per cent of the female sailors who filled out the survey for the "Women in Sailing Strategic Review" shared that they have experienced some sort of discrimination in the sport.

Today, Clara Gravely is a member of Canada’s national team and is preparing for the Olympic Games in 2024. Even though there are more and more prosperous female sailors like her every year, there are still proportionately more boys and men in the sport.

To address the inequity of sailing, ABYC received a substantial grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, enabling them to introduce a Girls Sailing Camp. In the camp, Gravely and ABYC’s Head Instructor Isabella Gillard are working to boost the confidence of these girls and help them take a leadership position on the boat. Gravely wants to help and support other female sailors and build a culture of sailing that the girls don’t want to leave.

Creating these girl-specific opportunities is essential because female sailors are often overlooked. Young girls don’t realise that their confidence and sense of belonging in the sport are undermined by underestimation. Because of this, they see no future for themselves in the sport and eventually drop out.

To work against that, van der Hart wants to start with the instructors and directors of sailing teams and make them more conscious and aware of how they talk with the girls and how they treat them.

“We have to deal with unconscious bias in sailing,” says van der Hart. “As an instructor, do you automatically choose the boy to be the skipper, or do you switch partners around?”

ABYC’s new measures help boost the confidence of girls that come into sailing at a young age to take a leadership position on the boat and stay in the sport. Van der Hart hopes that they can serve as a role model for other sailing clubs throughout the country. Slowly but surely, a shared experience can be built up, and girls will feel more confident and comfortable in the sport. Changing culture is always difficult; it will take time and much effort, but this is a small step towards equality in sailing.