How to keep women in sport, according to the creators of This Girl Can

• This blog originally appeared on the Derry City & Strabane Healthy Cities Community email in 2022. Subscribe here to join the mailing list this year.

In Derry City & Strabane,?women stop playing organised sport when they turn 18. Not every single one, obviously, but while the ratio of male to female sports club membership in 5-18 year olds isn't far off 50/50, in grown men and women the balance is 3:1. And that's a problem.

Of course joining a sports club isn't for everyone – some of us simply prefer a solo dander – but it does put community, exercise and all sorts of other good stuff at the heart of our everyday lives. So how can we make it more appealing to adult women?

Well who better to look to than Sport England, the organisation behind the viral This Girl Can advertising campaign which was based on the insight that often it is a fear of judgement holding women back from participation in sports.

In their words: "By celebrating a realistic vision of women and exercise in England, we created a campaign to provide women with inspiration and support to liberate them from the judgements that hold them back."

And it worked. After the first phase of the campaign in 2016 the number of women in England playing sport and getting active once a week, every week, increased by 250,000.

Now a national advertising campaign might be beyond the reach of our local sports clubs, but there are some things that any club, facility or group can do to bring grown women back into the fold, and, luckily, Sports England have written a handy checklist.?

The Sport England checklist

Design the offer to make it easy for women to do sport – don’t expect women to change to fit sport

??Right time: be open or run classes to suit women’s lifestyle (work and family)

? Right place: close to where women are, with the right facilities (changing rooms, hairdryers etc…)

? Right welcome: make sure the welcome is warm by reception/class leaders

? Right company: ideally they should be with people like them

? Right gear: reduce the fear of the wrong gear