The Council of Europe and the European Union have launched the "Active and equal: women's health in sport across generations" joint project dedicated to placing women's health at the heart of sport.
Policy makers, medical experts and elite athletes at the launch event on 5 March in Strasbourg discussed long-neglected barriers to female participation in sport. "Active and equal" aims at ensuring that women's health specificities are taken into account and mapped in the context of sport to create safe, stigma-free environments where women can thrive at every stage of life.
High-performance athletes come to Strasbourg
Speaking at the launch event, Conny Kreuter, a professional, international champion dancer from Austria, looked back at her career as a professional swimmer and said that "the hardest time was the transformation from a young adolescence into being a woman, when my body was changing. Now, as a professional dancer, I want to guide other women to be strong and take up their space. We also need to talk about the female body changing all the time to take off the pressure coming from society. I want to encourage every woman to embrace their body and to celebrate it!"
Baz Moffat, former Great Britain team rower, now a health coach and CEO of The Well HQ, UK, pointed out that the coaches and the system have to take their responsibility and work hard to create an environment where female athletes will thrive: "women and girls have a very different relationships with food, they need to eat well during training sessions and they need warming up for the injury prevention".
Practical improvements for women in sport
"Active and equal" is structured around three pillars designed to move the sector from awareness to implementation. Firstly, the project will conduct the first cross-European analysis of physiological, psychological, and social barriers affecting women across life stages, producing national reports and a consolidated European mapping report.
A modular "Women's health in sport toolkit" will then be developed to equip coaches, physical education teachers and health professionals with practical, science-based tools for supporting female athletes from adolescence through to older age. Lastly, through role-model video clips, the project will raise visibility Europe-wide to break the silence and stigma surrounding topics such as menstruation and menopause in sport.
To mark International Women's Day, the Council of Europe's Enlarged Partial Agreement on sport (EPAS) held a breakfast roundtable focusing on women and girls' participation in sport, addressing the inequalities revealed in the findings of the joint European Union - Council of Europe project "All in plus: promoting greater gender equality in sport".
The roundtable included presentations on insights, research as well as initiatives that have been put in place to ensure women's equal participation in sport, providing best practice examples for sports associations and member states. The event also addressed how to improve access to sport for women and girls.
Learn more about the "Active and equal" event
