Gender Equality Community Conversations Follow Up

A big thank you to all those who contributed to the success of our first community conversation on the topic of Gender Equality in Orienteering. We had over 50 people on the call on 15th March which indicates the interest in this area. A sincere thanks to the panel: Hollie Orr, Pippa Carcas, Graham Gristwood, Grace Molloy, Lucy Haines, Richard Oxlade and Sarah Dunn. They offered an insight into their orienteering pathways, influences and shared openly their opinions. We wanted to ensure we take forward some actions, which are outlined below.

Outcomes from Gender Equality discussion

Scottish Orienteering will:

• Create and distribute a survey to female members to understand where the barriers to entering into or progressing in key volunteering positions such as planners and controllers exist,
• Organise a CPD session on ‘How to coach female athletes’ bringing in some outside expertise in this field,
• Establish an ‘Equality’ sub-committee who will work with our Welfare Director, Neil Rankin on exploring the areas of equality, diversity and inclusion within orienteering further and make recommendations to the SOA Board of Directors.

We will shortly be putting out a call for interested people to join our Equality sub-committee as a first action.

We intimated that we would look to host community conversations on a monthly basis, in April we are hosting our virtual club conference so the plan is to host an interesting and engaging evening in May on the topic of ‘How inclusive and welcoming is our sport?’. We are in the process of finalising our panel and will publish details as soon as they are available.

If you have any further comments on the Gender Equality in Orienteering community conversation please do share them with us.