SA culture a hurdle for women

Team SA's final Commonwealth medal haul will be 40 - better than Delhi 2010, comparable to Melbourne 2006, and offering some encouraging signs.

But there are also some discouraging signs, and the most alarming is the enormous gender inequality in our medal haul. Forty percent of the team sent to Glasgow were women, but of our 40 medals, only eight were won by women.

That's 20%, and it is by far the lowest tally of any of the top 10 medal-winning nations in Glasgow.

It gets worse: In the medal-heavy Olympic sports of swimming and athletics, we won 21 medals, but only a single silver medal went to a female athlete (Sunette Viljoen in the javelin). Also, our men reached 14 individual swimming finals, compared to only one SA woman.

This is an alarming disparity that has to be addressed.

Understanding the problem requires understanding the journey taken by elite athletes to arrive at the podium.

The path begins with being exposed to a sport, and being inspired by it. This interest must then be fed by the encouragement and expertise of coaches, parents, teachers and peers.

The path then continues, relying on opportunities to train, facilities, exposure to competition, expertise of coaches and innate/genetic factors, which either limit or enable the young athlete to pursue sport as a career.

So, when a country cannot produce athletes, these paths must be interrogated - they are either blocked by barriers, have too many exit points, or the best potential athlete was not chosen to embark on the path.

Importantly, in the absence of a structured, strategic system to find athletes and facilitate this high-performance journey, which we unfortunately lack in SA, a country becomes increasingly vulnerable to broader environmental, cultural and social forces.

It is here, I believe, that the primary problem for SA's women exists.

It is not the only issue, and to blame only this problem would be false, because Nigeria and Cameroon, who arguably face similar socio-cultural gender challenges, owed 58% and 100% of their medals to women respectively.

This suggests that genetic factors and sporting system issues influence success.

But the challenges faced by women in South Africa, already documented for example in the corporate sector, cannot be ignored, since they are just as likely to exist in sport.

Given that success cannot happen without opportunities, a significant barrier may exist from the onset of the path.

The big drivers of opportunity inequality in sport are social and cultural factors. Colleagues of mine researching South Africans' attitudes to physical activity have already shown that, for cultural reasons, women are actively discouraged from even being physically active, let alone pursuing a career in elite sport. It is, sadly, the propagation of the stereotype that "a woman's place is in the ... ", except in South Africa, it is definitely NOT in stadiums, sports teams and on podiums.

There is precedence for this - Kenyan men began winning medals in 1964, but it took 32 years for women to join the triumph. That was largely because women were frowned upon for trying, and the wheels of change had to turn. They did, and now Kenya's women win as many medals as their men.

Given the socio-cultural barrier to entry, I suspect we simply do not get the early engagement with sport from South African girls. And then, even if we do, conflicting forces pull women away from sport as they mature, because it is not financially and culturally attractive to become an elite athlete.

Whatever the causes, and I have speculated what they might be in this article, they have to be explored further. This is not a sporting problem - our medal failures are always a symptom of broader issues, and in this particular case, those issues have ramifications that go beyond sport and medals, into the health and wellness of half our population.

The solution lies not only with the Department of Sport, but also with the Department of Health and the Department of Basic Education. The question is, do they have the appetite?