How to Increse Woman's Sport Club Membership

Abstract

As a consultant to a community sporting organization, the company’s purpose is to increase women’s membership in their club. The main findings of this report are investigations of the women’s participation in sport across three aspects; they are participation in traditional sporting environment, participation rates in different ages and preference. At last, there are recommendations concerning methods to increase women’s involvement in sport such as changing price and flexibility.

Introduction

Women’s participation rates from in all aspects of sports have always been relatively low in comparison to that of men (Sport England: 2003). As a result, opportunities for sports clubs to enhance the women’s participation are significantly increasing. More communities are focusing on increasing female involvement in sporting organization. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate women’s participation in sport. In this report, this interesting topic will be researched with respect to three areas---- women’s participation the traditional sporting environment in comparison to newly changed environment, participation rates in different ages, female participation preference.

(Graph from Sport London)

Findings:

1. Participation in the traditional sporting environment

To begin with, as Charlie et al (2005) stated that the years of data from Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation had shown that the sporting environment was the most fundamental element that related to arising females’ interest of going to sports club. The first graph below was description of participation rate comparing men to women across Australia in traditional sporting environment in 2005. Although the differences were not quite significant, it could be inferred that in traditional sporting environment female participation rates were always below male in a traditional sporting environment .According to Steven et al (2006), traditional sporting environment should be a male-focused, male-leading and muscular oriented equipment environment. In this circumstance, female would be less interested in going to sport clubs since they did not feel ‘focused’.

Additionally, in Steven’s research (2006), in the up-to-date sporting organizations, the issue above had been concentrated and partially solved. It was stated by them that the women’s involvement rates had increased gradually in a circumstance which contained equal male and female coaches, with less muscular oriented equipment and with more female board deciders (Steven et al, 2006). In short, female participation rate in sport is related to