Equality and Equity in Ultimate
Gender equity is just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s hard to being writing a topical blog commentating on the ultimate community at this time without writing something about gender equality and equity.
However, rather writing another article about all the problems we have with gender inequality and how important it is to fix them, I am simply going to refer you to the excellent articles written in Skyd magazine (and another) on Medium (and again), and on Ultiworld, and I am sure that there are many other excellent articles which I apologise for not explicitly linking.
What I am going to address in this article is all of the other equality and equity issues which the ultimate community faces, and where gender issues fit into this bigger picture.
The Ultimate Demographic
It’s no surprise to anyone that the largest demographic of ultimate players (certainly at an elite level) is white, well educated, privileged, straight, men. I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but just looking around at WUGC this summer; this seemed to be the case.
This begs the question: why?
In the UK, ultimate is rarely played before university level (although UKU is trying to spread the game at school level). This immediately filters almost everyone who doesn’t go to university… and we know that the demographic of university goers is skewed towards white, middle class people.
This overall trend can only really be dealt with by growing the sport at a school level in deprived areas. But what about diversity within university teams?
Most teams that I saw during my four years of university ultimate where again filled with white, privileged, male players. There are real issues in the way children are introduced to sport in PE lessons during school which put many people off sport all together by the time they get to university. However, there are many things which universities and individual university teams can do to increase diversity (York Sport Union have an excellent equal opportunities programme, for example).
On a more international level, the sport is developed most in the West: Europe, North America, Austrailia. Developing the game further in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America will do great things for the sport as a whole. It was inspiring to see India entering a women’s team for the first this at WUGC earlier this summer, and for Columbia Women to make the final. Of course Japan is an exception to Western dominance, but Japan is still a highly economically developed country when compared to Columbia, for example.
Gender Issues
Having raised the issue of a lack of non-white players, and the lack of players from less privileged backgrounds, where do gender issues lie in all of this?
Simply: how can we improve opportunities for non-white players, or players from less privileged backgrounds, or players who identify as anything other than heterosexual, if we can’t even secure equity for the female players we already have?
Equal opportunities have to start with gender equity.
Gender inequality is the most basic of all the inequalities we face, and if we can’t even deal with that then how can we hope to tackle any other form of inequality?
Having said that, the ultimate community seems to be an awful lot better with sexuality issues than a lot of other sports, although we can certainly do more.
I believe that ultimate has the potential to be one of the most inclusive sports in the world. The ultimate community is already exceptionally welcoming and counter-cultural when compared to other sports (just look at SOTG!). We are in a perfect place to continue our counter-cultural movement and show the rest of the world what sport should be like.
This will only come about if the entire community makes a concerted effort to work towards equity for everyone, and that requires a change in the assumptions we make about how we talk about ultimate, how we run events, and how we consume ultimate media.
