Women's sport is less about empowerment and more about gender and traditional ideas of femininity, a British researcher has claimed. Rather than encouraging more women to exercise for health, the notion of "flex appeal" often puts women off going to the gym because they feel they don't shape up to the lithe, leotarded stereotype.
Modern society has accepted the idea of athletic women, but this acceptance has not freed sportswomen from the pressure to conform to a certain look or body shape, explained Dr Precilla Choi, senior lecturer in health psychology at Keele University, Staffordshire.
She was addressing the closing day of the British Association Festival of Science. "Women are still being ranked for what they look like, rather than their ability in sport," Dr Choi said.
The big push to get women involved in sport was also more closely associated with altering body shape - typified by the emphasis on "legs, tums and bums" in aerobics classes - than with health benefits. Many women's magazines and media reports advocated regular exercise, but for the wrong reasons, she said.
"They are actually advocating looking thinner rather than having a healthy heart, strong bones or living longer. This is damaging for women because we have far too high a drop-out rate" from exercise classes because of a failure to achieve the desired shape.
This drop-out rate was against a background where eight out of 10 women did not take enough exercise, she said. Women - and to an increasing extent men - were coming under more pressure to look good even before they dared set foot in the gym.
"It has put a lot of women off exercise because they thought their bodies weren't good enough to appear in public," Dr Choi said.
Change should start at home, with girls being given as much access to sports equipment and sporting events as boys. There was also a serious need to introduce balance in the way that sports facilities were provided in schools, she added. Girls' access to facilities was often less than that for boys, and of an inferior quality.
More equality was also needed in international and professional sport. Women were prevented from running Olympic marathon events until 1984 because the event was considered too demanding, and still only played a maximum three sets at Wimbledon rather than the five played by men.