A Women’s Place is on the Start Line
A Women’s Place is on the Start Line
Estimated reading time: 17 minutes
Even though the running boom of the past 20 years has been driven by increased female participation, negative racing experiences for women remain a broad and endemic problem that seems baked into the very structure of many events. SheRACES, a new global campaign, is giving a voice to those who want to finally make running events truly equitable.
In 2011, aged 52 and facing a challenging 100km course through the breathtakingly beautiful but equally brutal Cheviot hills in northern England, Fran Britain was under no illusions about winning the Northumberland Ultra. Owing to the severity of the course profile, the challenging 16-hour cap for finishing, and the no-frills nature of the event, the gun went off with around 30 starters and Britain just wanted to be one of the few who would finish.
“I remember looking at the map before the race and thought that even finishing under the cut-off time would be tight for me,” Britain says. “And it was.”
Britain remembers a high drop-out rate, with a few runners even getting lost on course. “One poor lass fell and broke her collarbone,” Britain recalls. “I think there were only three or four women who actually started, so by the middle of the event I was the only woman left.”
“It feels like race organisers sometimes think that pregnancy is an injury. Or a choice. But you don’t know when you’re going to get pregnant”
Britain teamed up with another competitor along the course so they could work together. The conditions were so poor that the course signage blew away, turning the event into an orienteering mission. Race organisers were forced to extend the mid-race cut-off time after the frontrunners only just managed to beat the clock. At that point, the organisers decided to adjust the finishing cut-off time as well, allowing every runner who was somehow still self-navigating their way along the course to achieve a finish.
Twenty-one hours later, Britain and her new friend mapped their way over the windswept mountainous terrain and emerged to complete the event.
“Realistically, 21-ish hours isn’t an unreasonable time for an event on that terrain, having to figure out your own navigation,” Britain says. “We were the last ones in, and clearly well over the original 16-hour cut-off but, given we were allowed to continue, we still counted.”
While the organisers were trying to account for all the starters, Britain’s running mate realised that she was the only woman to finish the race. “It hadn’t occurred to me,” Britain says. “Because I was just so elated we had finished. I suppose that it also hadn’t occurred to the organisers that I was first because, overall, I finished last.”
“The more women we can get on the start line and doing that, the more we will all benefit. That joyous moment of crossing the finish line should be for everyone and more and more women should feel that joy”
Britain’s navigation partner had to prod the race directors to give Britain the prize for being the female winner (a neck-gaiter). “A very petty, perhaps small point, but it pissed me off enormously.” Britain says when she realised that the organisers were hesitant to acknowledge her as first female, and were initially unwilling to award her the top prize.
Although the race took place more than a decade ago, Britain says experiences such as hers persist in the running community, particularly in longer events where women are massively underrepresented at the start line, and certainly in the finishing chute. She still finds the lack of female representation on the start lines off-putting, and suspects that it is experiences like hers that leave the relatively few women participating (compared with the large number who run overall) wondering: “Why am I even bothering?”
“It’s just very sad. It won’t stop me entering races, but it’s frustrating to see, year after year, that the participation numbers only creep up slightly,” Britain says. “They are improving, but it’s such a small proportion.” This has led her and others to wonder why it is that races remain tone deaf and at times uninterested in building equitable experiences for women, and how this might be fixed so that as the start line of every race is representative of the number of women who run?
Pregnancy is not an injury
Although around half of runners are women, they are underrepresented at races, especially over longer distances. Women represent just 31% of marathon participants worldwide, according to RunRepeat’s 2019 Marathon Statistics report. The longer the distance, the fewer the number of female participants. Women represent 61% of 5km sign-ups, but just 16% of events over 50 miles. Meanwhile, [ital] The State of Ultra Running 2020 [end ital] report found that just 23% of ultra participants are female. All of this while, according to Running USA, overall race participation in the US has been in decline in recent years. And female participation in events has never met the overall percentages seen in those who just run, without wanting to compete. So what’s stopping women toeing the start line of mass participation events?
The experience of Anna Curtis, and that of others like her, may help to shed some light on why it is that women may not feel as though races see, respect and plan for the needs of female participants. Curtis describes herself as a “middle of the pack” runner. The 33-year-old Yorkshirewoman enters around three or four running or triathlon races a year and had lined up a half-marathon, trail marathon, triathlon, an extreme triathlon and a multi-day ultra for 2022. But when she became pregnant in December 2021, her planned races had to go on the back burner.
“The longer the distance, the fewer the number of female participants.”
She would have been 26 weeks pregnant at the time of The Celtman Triathlon, a race that involves a 3.4km openwater swim in Loch Shieldaig, followed by a 200km cycling section with 2,200m of climbing, finishing with a 42.2km run, ascending more than 1,600m over two Scottish Munros (roughly the equivalent of a mountain each). The event costs £395 – a huge amount of money to lose if you’re unable to make the start line. At the point of signing up, the event organisers recommend taking out insurance to recoup lost funds if anything should happen between signing up and competing.
The Celtman Triathlon’s website does warn would-be applicants that the organisers will not allow for deferrals, or refunds “for any reason”, so Curtis decided to explore the details of the insurance policy at the time. “It did cover you for injuries, but for pregnancy, it only insured women who had complications,” Curtis says. “I wasn’t trying to get pregnant at the time I entered. My husband and I had talked about it, but hadn’t planned it and didn’t know how long it would take.” Like many exclusive and complex ultra events, Celtman’s entry is by lottery only, so when Curtis submitted her entry form, she wasn’t guaranteed to get a spot on the start line.
“So I decided to enter and I didn’t take out the insurance because I thought, ‘What’s the point?’ If I got pregnant in the interim, it wouldn’t cover me anyway.”
When Curtis discovered she was expecting, she attempted to contact Celtman’s organisers, as she felt it would not be safe for her or her unborn child if she raced. What transpired next surprised her: nothing.
Then, just two weeks before the race, she received an e-mail . The race director said: “If you want to take part in another year then we can give you a discount [for that entry].” They would be keeping her money for the 2022 entry but she would bypass the lottery for a future event.
“It feels like race organisers sometimes think that pregnancy is an injury. Or a choice. But you don’t know when you’re going to get pregnant,” Curtis says. “For me, racing is what I do. It’s a big part of my life and part of my identity.”
In a statement, Stuart McInnes, CEO of XTRI World Tour AS, which organises the race, said: “At Celtman, and the wider XTRI World Tour, we have always encouraged the participation of women. We have a quota of 20% of female slots in the Celtman, so we ballot them separately first and then the ‘losers’ go back into the ballot with the men so they have an extra chance.”
Celtman’s organisers did promise to “revise [its] policy for the coming year” regarding accommodating women who became pregnant before race day, but did not commit to any specific policies “as we do not open entries until November and there is much more work to do on our race manual before then, but we will make a specific exception for pregnancy in our deferral policy.”
In stark contrast to her issues with the triathlon, Curtis was pleasantly surprised at how accommodating other race organisers were to her request to defer her entries until after she’d had her baby. “I was entered into a marathon for this coming October, but I wanted to defer by 12 months, because when you start reading about running after a baby, it was all a bit scary and I’m not sure how quickly I’ll get back to it. And actually [the race organisers] were really good. Their standard policy is to defer to another race that’s already open, but I wanted to defer to the same race a year later which wasn’t open, so they issued me with a voucher to enter the race when it did open for sign-ups.”
For one of her events, she was only able to get 75% of her entry fee back. “I was kind of OK with that. It’s a policy for everybody. It would be good if they had better policies, but it was something at least,” Curtis says. And for her multi-day ultra she was both surprised and grateful that they offered her the option to defer for up to three years.
“They’ve got a full policy statement on pregnancy. I didn’t know this at the time I contacted them. They have an entire policy on improving diversity in running, improving women’s participation. For me, it definitely makes me want to race with them because I know they’re going to be good and they’re fair.”
This certainly is not the norm, but having these sorts of policies could incentivise female athletes to choose to race events that do.
Why racing matters
Anna isn’t alone in her experiences of trying to defer her race entries after becoming pregnant.
Someone else who knows the struggle only too well is ultra runner Sophie Power. She became a household name in 2018, after a photo of her breastfeeding her three-month-old baby at an aid station of the 106-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB) went viral. She’d decided to race because UTMB’s deferral policies meant that she would lose her lottery place in the race if she didn’t compete during the year in which she’d given birth. She had already lost her place in the 2014 race for the same reason. Had she not taken part in 2018, she would have had to go through the lengthy process of re-qualifying. This process has been updated in the last few years, but at the time, Power had to run a number of qualifying races which were awarded a certain number of “UTMB Points”. Once you have enough points, you can then enter the ballot.
Even though the running boom of the past 20 years has been driven by increased female participation, negative racing experiences for women remain a broad and endemic problem that seems baked into the very structure of many events. This is something that Power is hoping to address with the SheRACES campaign, which she launched on Global Running Day (1 June 2022) . It calls for races of all distances, not just ultras, to be more female-friendly, by adhering to a set of guidelines that even the playing field.
RACING IS IMPORTANT
SheRACES wants event organisers to offer a better race-day experience for women, from sign-up to results. The threefold approach includes encouraging more women to sign up to races, changes to race logistics for a more enjoyable race experience and equality in race previews, results and prize money.
“Racing is important – it brings us together, helps us push our boundaries and gives us a sense of achievement,” Power explains. It’s part of the reason she wanted to start the campaign, which is focused on the female experience at events specifically. “This is about removing the barriers to racing so that women of all races, shapes and sizes feel welcome, our needs are fairly considered, and our competition held in equal regard.”
Keen to crowdsource the experiences of fellow runners, Power created a survey to go alongside the launch of her campaign and received more than 1,800 responses from around the world. Among the findings, 88 % of women said they would be more likely to enter races that made an express commitment to equitable and inclusive treatment of female participants.
The pink shirt problem
If women are not equitably represented on the start lines of longer races, such as marathons and ultras, catering more to the needs of women could be one way to reverse this negative trend. Surely this is a win-win in the running world, as event organisers, who are still struggling in the wake of months of cancelled events after the outbreak of Covid-19, would get more people entering their races and women can take part in races knowing that their competition is valued equally to that of the men taking part?
Honor Baldry from Leeds has been running for 17 years. The 37-year-old is supporting the SheRACES campaign because she has experienced inequality at races herself. One such example came at the end of a fell race that took place in the Lake District, England.
“This is about removing the barriers to racing so that women of all races, shapes and sizes feel welcome, our needs are fairly considered, and our competition held in equal regard”
“I did a race once where they had pink T-shirts for female finishers and blue ones for male finishers. I’m sure it came from a nice place, but I felt a bit deflated when I wasn’t allowed a blue shirt, as they were only for the male finishers,” Baldry says. “It feels like a small thing, but was an occasion where they’d tried to make things more inclusive and it backfired.”
Although this is only one element that the SheRACES campaign is looking to address, Baldry hopes that race organisers also adopt the campaign’s race guidelines, in order to encourage more women to take part and feel included. “I’d [also] love to see more female imagery used in marketing for what have been framed until now as traditionally ‘male’ races, particularly in fell racing,” she says (Baldry also notes that these events can feel like non-starters for female racers because many have cut-off finishing times, although she acknowledges that cut-off times are also there for the safety of volunteers.)
As well as pregnancy deferral policies, cut-off times and ill-fitting, gender-stereotyping T-shirts, there were two main issues that respondents to the SheRACES Races survey were keen to point out as barriers to racing entry, and just off-putting for them as women. One is toilet provision – or a lack of – while the other was the behaviour of other participants (and even volunteers). Many spoke of misogynistic language and attitudes that had put them off . “There’s never enough toilets,” says 37-year-old survey respondent Hannah Howard. “I struggled with pre-race gastro-nerves and not being confident that I’d be able to get to a loo beforehand made everything more stressful.”
SheRACES
Howard is not alone in her concerns about the number of toilets available at races. About 70 % of runners who responded to the survey said they had experienced insufficient toilet provision at races. “There’s never a queue at the men’s,” Howard points out. “I did go to a couple of events where they had changed some of the portable toilets for extra ones for women, but then men would just use those as well. Some of it is so easy. It’s not like you’re asking [events] to spend more money and put in loads more facilities. Actually, if we just think about stuff a bit and consider that different people need different things and we can’t just always do everything the way we’ve always done it because sometimes there’s a better way.”
One of Howard’s best racing memories was an all-female event, the Purbeck 5, a five-mile race in the English countryside. “It was truly hilarious when we all stood on the start line. Everyone looked at each other and asked if they wanted to go to the front and no one was really up for it. We’re all competitive people. But no one felt the need to be getting the elbows out, or making comments, or even just jostling to the front, because the expectation was that there was going to be someone else to do that and it turns out that all of the people that were going to do that were all men and they weren’t there.”
What does true equity look like?
A 2021 BBC Sport study into prize money found more than 90 % of sports now pay men and women equally at a major championship or event. But that hasn’t always been the case, with big gender pay gaps in sports including golf, football and basketball. Running has always been pretty good when it comes to equality in prize money in men’s and women’s races, once women were allowed to enter them, that is.
From 1928 to 1960, women were prohibited from competing in any event longer than 200m at the Olympics because it was thought that strenuous exercise would harm a woman’s future ability to have children. And even though the modern marathon originated at the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens, it wasn’t until 70 years later, in 1967, that Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as an official entrant, and the only woman in a field of 741 runners. Even then, she had to hide her identity by signing up under her first initial, and was later shouted at and famously chased by the race director in what became an iconic moment of defiance and the beginnings of a movement towards equity that is only now being fully realised.
“We want to make the TCS London Marathon the most diverse, equitable and inclusive marathon in the world”
In recent years, there has been some progress in achieving equality in other aspects of running races. Just last July, the London Marathon updated its entry policies so that pregnant and post-partum participants now have the option of enhanced deferrals. Previously, deferrals were allowed for ballot entries, but if you had run a qualifying time for a championship or good for age place, you couldn’t keep that spot. The new policy means that general entry participants, or participants with a good for age or championship place in the 2022 London Marathon who are either pregnant or post-partum have the opportunity to defer their marathon place to one in the same category in any of the next three editions of the London Marathon.
“We want to make the TCS London Marathon the most diverse, equitable and inclusive marathon in the world,” says Hugh Brasher, the Marathon’s event director. “With this objective in mind, we have been reviewing our entry terms and conditions, and while we recognise there’s still more work to be done, we believe these changes are an important step forward.”
This change came off the back of months of campaigning from Sophie Power. “I cried when I heard the news. I’d been fighting for this for over a year and my campaign for this change inspired me to set up SheRACES. To encourage all race directors to actively level the start line for women. To give us an equal experience when we race. And respect our competition,” Power says.
LIKE THE WIND IT’S WHY WE RUN
want more stories like this?
Subscribe to Like the Wind and receive global running stories in our quarterly magazine
“Ultimately, I’d like SheRACES to not exist. My goal is that every sporting event is designed through both a male and female lens, recognising that we are different and sometimes require different facilities and different policies.”
But Power is only one person, and inspiring a community of women to take action when they see something that isn’t right or is hindering progress in sport is what she defines as the “very heart and soul” of the SheRACES campaign. “It exists to give women the power to say that this is not right. By calling out what’s wrong, you are making things better for other women, too.”
Power hopes her initiative and the voice of the thousands of women who have participated so far will serve as a support and guidance for event directors to get more women on their start lines, which will benefit participants and races both competitively and financially. “We know the power of racing. It’s not just running – racing is different,” Power says. “Racing is special. It brings us together. It allows us to set goals and meet our targets and come together as one and push ourselves. The more women we can get on the start line and doing that, the more we will all benefit. That joyous moment of crossing the finish line should be for everyone and more and more women should feel that joy. That can only be done when all races are equally as welcoming to us as men.”
Anna Harding is the lead presenter on The Running Channel on YouTube. She’s run 11 marathons, including 4 of the 6 World Major Marathons and a backyard marathon in her mum’s 20m-long garden.
Spanish illustrator Dina Compadre loves creating wobbly images, animations and surface patterns to apply in different media.