“I’m one of the laziest people I know!” The declaration is followed by laughter, but Lauren Barkas is serious. The 21-year-old chemistry student had no interest in sport, and it took her a long time to decide to go along to one of the University of Hull’s women-only fitness sessions.
“I heard about it and thought it sounded OK, but I didn’t really want to go,” she says. “Then I thought, ‘Come on, give it a try, it’s your first year of uni,’ and I went and loved it straight away.”
Now she’s an ambassador for the scheme, known as Fabulass, and she has the responsibility of motivating other less-than-sporty women to get moving.
“I explain that I was once like that,” she says. “One flight of stairs, and if there was a lift I’d be getting the lift. There’s no pressure involved in this scheme – that would put me off classes.”
Sophie Riordan, in her third year of studying English literature, is another ambassador for Fabulass. She had tried out for one of the competitive sports teams, but had found the experience off-putting.
“The people there were perfectly friendly, but I felt very intimidated, and not very good at the sport,” she recalls.
‘It doesn’t matter if you’re not good at it’
“Fabulass was just very welcoming. It was a very fun environment, there was always music going, everyone was always chatting to each other, and the feeling from the very beginning was always if you’re not very good at it, it doesn’t matter at all, as long as you’re having a work-out and having fun.”
Participants don’t know what the session will contain until they arrive – and it could be anything from Zumba to rugby, all led by a qualified coach.
“We recognise that a lot of people don’t want to commit to a sports team,” says Riordan, “or maybe they’re not particularly sporty but they want to exercise because of all the benefits, mentally and physically. So this is a chance for the girls to do that in a very fun environment.”
Like Hull, plenty of universities struggle to get their female students physically active. According to Sport England’s data, at the age of 16, only 47% of girls play sport regularly, compared to nearly 75% of boys. By the age of 25, that figure has dropped to 40% of women taking part in organised physical activity.
To get their female students physically active, several universities have piggybacked on Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign, which swept the country in 2015 with its striking adverts, using pictures and footage of women exercising. Occasionally – and controversially – it focused on just one part of their body, using taglines such as “I jiggle, therefore I am”, “Sweating like a pig, feeling like a fox” and “I kick balls, deal with it”.
Staying attractive while playing sport
With fewer women than men exercising regularly, Sport England’s adverts were intended to show women they could be physically active and remain attractive. One year after the campaign launch, Sport England claimed credit for inspiring 2.8m women to exercise more.
It was not a campaign that impressed everyone. Feminist academic Dr Amy Pressland, an expert in sports media, was one of those with doubts.
“Essentially, I like the premise of This Girl Can – motivating women to get into sport, to enjoy exercise, and not to care what others think while they’re doing it,” she says. “However, there are several issues with the campaign which means that it does not live up to these aspirations.
“The name in itself infantilises and diminishes the status of women to pre-adolescent beings. We know that in all aspects of amateur and professional sport, women are viewed as inferior to their male counterparts and receive second-class treatment by organisations, the press, and in accessing adequate facilities and coaching. Calling a campaign to supposedly empower women This Girl Can only supports the status quo of women’s subordinate status in sport.
“The adjoining catchphrases at times belittle the visual messages. For example, the image of the woman boxing which states, ‘Under these gloves is a beautiful manicure’ reinforces the idea of women as hyper-feminine, always aware of the importance of aesthetically pleasing others, and not focusing 100% on sport.”
Nevertheless, it was a concept that struck a chord with the University of Roehampton, which has an unusual issue – its student population is 80% female, and sports activater Danielle McAllister has a real challenge planning activities that will appeal to everyone. The university offers women-only workouts, including boxercise, pilates and yoga, but under the This Girl Can banner they have also started running sessions encouraging students to try out a sport.
“We had a back-to-netball session – though you could also go if you’d never played the sport before,” she explains. “We’ve also had women-only tennis sessions, and gymnastic – same as the netball, you didn’t have to be experienced.”
Inspiring under-represented groups
The University of Wolverhampton restyled the Sport England slogan as This Girl Will, and hosted a full fixture list of events in the autumn – with fitness classes alongside inspirational talks.
Habiba Amjad was one of the speakers. When she enrolled at university, she was Britain’s first female British Muslim sports student, and she is now working on a doctorate on the representation of Muslim women in sport.
“I started doing circuit training when I was in secondary school, and that was the love of my life,” she says. “Then I was thinking about what to do at uni and I wasn’t really sure, so I went on the Ucas website, looked at all the courses, and at Wolverhampton they had a course called sports studies, and I said, ‘OK, let’s go for this.’”
Now Amjad is the university’s student union president, and she hopes that her work with This Girl Will, as well as her elected position, will encourage other girls to consider sport as a subject, a hobby and a career.
“I hope I’ve inspired younger girls to consider it, to show they can do it – and especially if you’re from a different background,” she says.
Lauren Barkas says it’s the important thing is that you don’t need to be athletically gifted to enjoy a workout.
“A lot of fitness classes, it’s very forced – you have to do this or that,” she says. But the ethos of This Girl Can is different. “Obviously they want you to do it, but at your own pace – you don’t have to push yourself if you’re not feeling it!”
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