UM study explores ‘gendering’ of girls’ sports injuries
A new four-year study led by a University of Manitoba researcher in partnership with Sport Manitoba has received over $384,000 in funding from the Government of Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to improve sporting environments for adolescent girls in sports historically dominated by boys.
Dr. Joanne Parsons, associate professor in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, is leading the study, which will look at the physical, social and cultural environments girls are exposed to while playing baseball, lacrosse and tackle football in Manitoba.
“Sports environments are often highly gendered, rife with strong beliefs about ‘appropriate’ activities for girls and boys. This may impact opportunities, but it can also be detrimental to girls’ health,” Parsons says.
She says girls have six times the rate of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) knee injuries compared to boys, and that most research into uncovering why that gender disparity exists has been focused on “unmodifiable sex-based characteristics” – such as hormones – rather than the environments in which the athletes are playing and training.
“We’re looking at posters on the wall and how the physical environment is set up. We’re looking at policies and procedures, and talking to athletes, coaches and sport staff to see if there are any gendered expectations, beliefs or experiences that may result in different injury risk for girls,” Parsons says.
The data will be used to create a tool for Sport Manitoba to use in coach education.
“Sport Manitoba has quite an extensive educational pathway for their coaches, so we envision this as an online learning module for coaches to learn about gendered environmental influences on sports injury. It will also focus on providing advice on how to try to tackle these things and decrease injury risk for girls,” Parsons says.
Janet McMahon, president and CEO of Sport Manitoba, says the reasons why ACL injuries are more common in girls are not clear.
“This is why research is needed to help allow more girls to participate in sport. Furthermore, providing our coaches with the education they need to recognize and address the unique challenges faced by girls in sport is essential. It can not only help reduce injury risk, but can also create safer, more supportive environments for all athletes to excel,” McMahon says.
The project will have input from an international, interdisciplinary collaborative network of clinicians and academics through the EDGE Lab, an initiative formed last year by Parsons and Dr. Stephanie Coen, associate professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.
EDGE Lab reimagines equitable and inclusive sport and physical activity using what is called a ‘gendered environmental approach’—a concept coined by Parsons and Coen in their landmark paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2021.
Parsons and Coen also recently received two $25,000 prizes from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for another project that explores the experiences of recently retired elite women athletes in the UK.