Spot The Balls

The gang’s all here… Temple Carraig THURS18NOV21

Politics and Society student at Temple Carrig, Amy Kennedy has been looking into attitudes and involvements with sports when it comes to gender.

Tasked with creating a citizenship project as part of her Leaving Cert, Amy has actually spent the last few years exploring this subject with other school students.

And the resulting study, Sport And Gender In Secondary Students In The Greystones-Delgany Area, is now ready to reveal Amy’s findings.

But firstly, a few words from the author herself…

Given the number of conversations I have had with other school students over the last few years about their involvement in local sport (or lack thereof), I noticed a distinct gender split, leading me to focus my research for this project on the gender biases present in sport on a community level.

The goal of my survey – comprising responses from nearly three-hundred Greystones secondary students and teachers – is to assess how much this gender inequality in sporting activities has permeated the local area, with an emphasis on the impact to teenagers as they move through the school system.

Greystones is home to any number of sports clubs, sporting facilities, and three large secondary schools. So, while community efforts to improve participation in sport have not been ineffective, the town doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This means the gender biases present in sport on a national (and international) level have naturally slipped through, and more needs to be done on a school and club basis to ensure not only equality of access, but also equality of outcome.

The results of this survey, and a number of similar ones, are compiled and compared in this report, Sport and Gender in Secondary Students in the Greystones-Delgany Area, which can be viewed here.