Women: Sport and Physical Activity

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the role of sport and physical activity in providing a positive body image among young women.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

My Lords, I thank the Whips’ Office for finding time for this debate and those noble friends who have stayed on.

I have a number of interests in sport—all listed in the register—but perhaps the most pertinent is that I co-chair the All-Party Group on Women's Sport with the right honourable Barbara Keeley MP, which is supported by the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation. I also thank the Lords Library for its notes on this topic.

I do not think that we could have picked a better time for this debate. Anyone who was watching Rebecca Adlington on “I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” last week will have seen her tearful reaction when talking about body image. She said: “It’s making me very, very insecure that I have to look a certain way. For me, I was an athlete. I wasn't trying to be a model, but pretty much every single week on Twitter I get somebody commenting on the way I look”.

This is a young women that we should all be proud of. She is a four-time Olympic medalist and a world champion, but many will understand how she feels. It is a worrying trend that young women are increasingly put under pressure to conform to look a certain way.

If I had said at the age of 15 that I thought I had poor body image, I would have been told to pull myself together. However, body image anxiety is a leading cause of depression and low self-esteem; health and relationship problems; poor participation at school; and lack of progression at work.

It is worrying that body image has become more important than health; that the majority of young people would rather be thin than healthy. In the UK, 1.6 million people suffer from an eating disorder. Dieting can lead to eating disorders, and girls who diet are 12 times more likely to binge eat. However, a positive body image can help with academic attainment, cutting down on smoking and teenage pregnancy

We need to understand that the relationship between body image and physical activity can be both positive and negative. The reality is that young women are facing pressure from many directions. For many women, a poor body image and lack of self-confidence is the biggest barrier that prevents them being active and it is easy to understand why. Bizarrely it is one of the things that could help them. If you put “Jessica Ennis” and “abs” in to a search engine, there are pages that show how you can look like Jess in just two minutes a day. The reality is more like six hours a day, 50 weeks of the year for about 15 years.

Skimming through some of the other comments over the weekend, I noticed that Chantelle Houghton—described as a former reality TV star, which is a whole other debate in itself—was heavily criticised for going out jogging in a pair of running tights and a cropped top. The obsession with how quickly celebrities lose their baby weight and get back into their pair of jeans puts undue pressure on others. Many of the women's magazines are full of pictures of bodies which are either beach-ready or not. It is hard to find many that do not contain some diet that will help you to look like your chosen celebrity. I cannot even begin to add up the number of women who get more coverage for the colour they have dyed their hair than they do for their achievements.

The data that the YMCA presents is compelling: more than half the UK population suffers from body image anxiety. Media, advertising and celebrity culture account for 75% of the influence on body image in society; and 95% of the population cannot physically achieve the typical “body ideal” presented in media and advertising.

Physical activity in schools is not going to right all those wrongs, but the right PE will help. For most women and girls, we know that once they become physically active, their body image and self-confidence improves, leading to greater academic success and job prospects. Research by Ernst & Young in the USA shows that many of the top female executives played competitive sport at a high level all the way through university.

We need to define a new language around sport. People often say “sport” when they mean “physical activity”—physical literacy as well as competitive sport. You have only to mention PE to most women and they shudder. We need to be clear in thinking about a health agenda and getting more people active. Getting girls to be active will lead to more of them playing competitive sport, which would be great. However, if the starting focus is on competition, it is likely to lead to fewer girls being active.

Since the Olympics and Paralympics, the Department for Education has suggested that there will be an increased focus on competitive sport in schools. That is fine for many. It would have suited me fine at the age of 20 but not when I was 13. So why do we need to find a new way of doing PE in schools? Evidence from the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation shows that 46% of the least active girls say that they do not like the activities they do in PE; 45% of girls agree that “sport is too competitive”; and over a third of the least active girls do not think that they have the skills to do well in sport, so it is obvious that we need to do more to build confidence. Some 75% of girls agreed that girls are self-conscious of their bodies and 59% of the least active girls do not think that it is important to be good at physical activity. In many schools it is okay to be a sporty boy but not to be a sporty girl.

On average, female athletes are more likely to have a positive body image, and less likely to consider themselves overweight, than female non-athletes. Earlier this year, I chaired a Task and Finish Group for the Welsh Assembly Government, looking at the role of PE in schools. We recommended that it became a core subject, and that was picked up by the Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic Legacy, which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, sat on.

We must teach good skills at a young age, which for girls also means a mix of sports and activities as well as being given the option of single-sex and mixed sessions. A number of women wrote to me about this issue. Arriene, who is 28, said:

“I never joined a gym because PE taught me that I wasn't good enough and sport made me feel useless”.

The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation’s Changing the Games for Girls shows that 51% of school sport and PE put girls off. Kate Allenby MBE, an Olympian who is now a PE teacher, said that girls need good role models. Keith Kendrick, who wrote on the website Parentdish, said that he desperately needed Becky Adlington to be a strong role model for his stepdaughter. Many women have written to me to express the horror of communal changing rooms—and a few men as well. I am sure that most of us can remember that dreadful feeling. However fit and strong you feel, it puts much undue pressure on people.

The YMCA suggests that if we do not get this right, we will jeopardise the health and well-being of future generations, and I agree. Its research has shown that five year-olds now worry about their size and appearance, that body image is the biggest single worry for many 10 year-olds, that by the age of 14 half of girls and a third of boys have started dieting, and that children are directly influenced by parents’ body image, whether that is positive or negative

Today’s young people aged between 18 and 34 are much more likely than previous generations to have heard their parents talking about dieting, criticising their own appearance or even teasing their children about their appearance or weight. Girlguiding UK has some fantastic research results in its Girls’ Attitudes Survey 2012. When it asked why girls do sport, 29% said that they did it to keep fit, 46% said that it was to lose weight or control their weight, but 44 % said that it helped them to feel good about their bodies. It has also shown that one in seven young people would prefer to be slim than healthy, and findings from the WSFF show that 19% have said that being slim is more important than being healthy.

There is a huge pressure on girls to be skinny. The size zero that we hear about—there is a great deal of discussion about this being the size of many models—is the size of a 12 year-old girl. It is not normal or acceptable. It is worrying that so many women have an aspiration that they cannot achieve.

We need a balanced approached in schools. We need to look at best practice; to celebrate participation and not only winning. We need to look at the uniforms that girls wear—luckily, we have moved on a long way from my days in school, where it was gym knickers and an Aertex blouse—because a key component is that many girls worry about how they look. We need to address the issue of changing rooms and consider putting hairdryers in them. If that is one of the things that stops girls being active, how difficult can it be to put a couple of hairdryers in every changing room? We need to work with young girls to give them confidence.

For me this is a very important area and I would like to ask the Minister a question: how much have the different departments—Health, Education and DCMS—discussed the matter? How can they work together across departments to find a workable solution—because a solution to this will not be found through one department alone?