Social inclusion and sport: culturally diverse women's perspectives

Australian Journal of Social Issues, Autumn, 2009 by Natasha Cortis

The difference culturally appropriate facilities and programs can make is reflected in the perspective of Amira, a Lebanese-Australian aged in her 60s. She articulates the inclusionary potential of small adaptations to the operations of sport facilities: women only swimming times. For Amira, gender segregated opportunities for swimming, managed by a non-government organisation with strong inclusionary ethos, allowed her to exercise in comfort, and to mix with other cultures, breaking the stereotype that culturally diverse groups want to restrict access to facilities for themselves and keep others out:

We love mixing with other cultures. We have in the pool Lebanese, Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, Australian, Italian, Greek [women]. We're all like we come from one family...We enjoy it a lot, the swimming time. With all women we have no problem. When you do exercise you have to wear something comfortable, you have to take the veil off and uncover, and if men are around you don't feel comfortable. If you do the exercise when men are around, you have to wear the hijab, otherwise you do a sin against your religion...when the pool is opened to everyone (men and women), I have to wear a longer costume, you know, and I don't feel comfortable. I can't do everything I want because the hijab is on me ... when you cover you have to a little bit isolate yourself. Not from other culture. No, we love to mix with everyone. That's our religion, to mix with all religion, with all nationalities. (Group 4)

For Amira and other women, gender segregated opportunities for swimming allowed women to exercise in comfort, and to mix with women from other cultures, breaking the stereotype that culturally diverse groups want to restrict access to facilities for themselves and keep others out. For Amira, women-only swimming time at certain times of the day meant women from many different backgrounds could mix. For her, the social and inclusionary benefits of physical activity, mixing with women from other nationalities, were reasons to stay active. Indeed, greater access to gender segregated opportunities would enable these women to participate in formal, organised, group activities, providing them with the social as well as health benefits of sport and recreation.

Conclusions

Reinforcing national policies aimed at promoting mass participation, stakeholder interviewees drawn from the sporting industry expressed commitment to mainstream targeting, allowing them to play down notions that their organisations and the sporting cultures they sought to govern may impede minority participation. In contrast, the women's accounts of barriers underline the need to better fuse social inclusion, sport and public health agendas with more active strategies to engage culturally diverse women. The women articulated a range of personal, social and institutional barriers to participation, implicating culturally inappropriate venues and facilities as major sources of social exclusion. Although participants in some areas had access to women only gyms or swimming pools at certain times, these were not necessarily seen to provide sufficiently appropriate spaces for some culturally diverse women.