International Women’s Week: Taneesha Stallbaum

At UWA Sport, we are committed to providing everyone equality of opportunity, experience and outcome.

We #ChooseToChallenge the equality of sport for women all around the world. We are celebrating IWD this year by featuring our sporting game-changers, next up is UWA Sport staff member Taneesha Stallbaum.

Being a woman is a unique experience, one shared by almost half of the world’s population. Yet despite being around 49.5 per cent of the population, women are not yet equally represented, both in sport and many other aspects of our community. This is one of the many reasons International Women’s Day should be important to everyone, despite being 110 years old.

International Women’s Day elevates women’s voices and gives them a stage on which to discuss the things they are passionate about. It gives women like me, when asked to write a piece about my experiences as a woman in sport, a time to have our say. Despite initially assuming I am under qualified I am proud of being a woman in sport.

Women’s experiences are valuable to sports and the sporting community. They are valuable because as women participating in these communities, their experiences are shaped by them and in turn must be allowed to shape these spaces. Despite participating in physical activity in one form or another throughout my life, I have always seen myself as physical and energetic rather than sporty. I kayaked from a young age with my father, but I only started to seriously engage in sport when a woman I hugely admired introduced me to rock climbing.

A passion which led me to join the UWA Outdoor Club at the start of my university career. In the Outdoor Club I found community and it is only in finding community that I found my place in sport. The community that sports produce is fundamental to the sports themselves and if women are invested in these communities, they are inevitably shaping them.

Being a woman in sport promotes women in sport. Therefore, I decided, despite not feeling qualified, to try to articulate my strongly held belief that International Women’s Week and Day are critical even 110 years on. It provides a platform for people like me to say that sports have been one of the singularly most positive impacts in my life. They are the foundation of my community and many of the relationships which I hold most dear have been forged through sport.

For women however sport is not perfect, and we must continue to work towards equality. We must continue to critically engage and question the role women play in our sporting communities. We must encourage women to take up sport and provide them with communities in which they can see themselves as leaders. I will continue to strive to do better, to question why I don’t see myself represented equally in rock-climbing gyms and amongst my fellow kayakers, and try to make a difference in this International Women’s Week, will you?