A brand new report on ladies in Canadian sport management roles presents a combined bag of progress, stalling and backtracking.
The variety of ladies on the boards of nationwide sports activities organizations, that are unpaid positions, has jumped. The variety of ladies who’re paid chief government officers has plummeted.
Canadian Girls and Sport launched its 2025-26 “Girls in Sport Management Snapshot” report Tuesday, saying ladies now maintain a document 45 per cent of board seats and 48 per cent of board chair positions in nationwide sport organizations.
“It actually exhibits that the sports activities system is able to change,” CWS chief government officer Allison Sandmeyer-Graves mentioned. “This can be a lot of particular person organizations selecting to place the trouble in to get that consequence.”
Girls make up 48 per cent of senior workers throughout the nationwide sport system, however simply 34 per cent of CEOs or government administrators — down eight proportion factors since 2023 and the bottom stage since Canadian Girls and Sport started gathering the information in 2018.
“That’s a very dramatic drop,” Sandmeyer-Graves mentioned. “What Canadians care most about is children being wholesome, children having all of the alternatives accessible to them to develop up with good psychological well being, good bodily well being, alternatives to have a robust sense of neighborhood, to develop these important management abilities.
“What we all know is that too many children are being left on the sidelines of these alternatives and, on this case, we’re particularly speaking about women.
“How does management connect with that? Effectively, extra inclusive management produces a extra inclusive sports activities system, interval. It truly is a really highly effective and efficient lever that we will use to vary the system by having ladies’s views instantly concerned in decision-making of all types inside sport.”
Tuesday’s snapshot didn’t embrace professional sport, however drew information from nationwide, provincial and territorial sport our bodies — which predominantly give kids their begin and pathways in sport — plus multi-service organizations such because the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees, and the community of sport institutes throughout Canada.
In sport management roles in provinces and territories, ladies made up 45 per cent of boards, 47 per cent of senior workers, 40 per cent of board chairs and 46 per cent of chief government officers or government administrators.
Why that issues, in keeping with CWS, is that nationwide sport leaders usually lower their enamel on the provincial and territorial stage.
The report revealed a void within the variety of Indigenous ladies, ladies of color, ladies with disabilities and LGBTQ+ ladies on boards and senior workers. The report identified that males from these teams expertise comparable gaps.
An unnamed girl on a provincial/territorial sports activities board quoted within the report mentioned, “I’m all the time the one Black girl. I’m not all the time the one girl … however I’m all the time and have nonetheless to this present day been the one Black girl.”
“Alternatives for management for ladies on this house aren’t benefiting everybody, and we’re lacking some actually vital views,” Sandmeyer-Graves mentioned.
“The progress has mirrored current privileges in our society and throughout the sports activities system. Larger intention goes to be required to make sure that the illustration that we see in sport management displays Canada and the communities that we’re serving.”
Among the many calls to motion within the Way forward for Sport in Canada Fee’s remaining report in March was to make range obligatory in board member choice standards.
Whereas sports activities organizations have fairness, range and inclusion insurance policies and techniques, they’ve finished little to diversify boards, the report mentioned.
Way forward for Sport in Canada Fee suggestions to overtake the game system, together with the federal authorities’s announcement final month of $775 million in new funding over 5 years, characterize a chance, Sandmeyer-Graves mentioned.
“We’re sure and decided that ladies and women will profit from this funding, however extra in order that it really, actually is embedded,” she mentioned.
“After we take a look at the CEOs, that doesn’t imply everybody has to have a girl as CEO as a result of that’s simply not sensible, but it surely does communicate to what’s your coverage for recruitment? What’s your nomination course of on your board? How do you cut back the bias that exists in these areas, not as a matter of non-public desire or private apply, however organizational coverage?
“That’s the kind of factor that may generate progress and shield progress so we will see change sustained.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first revealed Could 26, 2026.
Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press
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