By Hannah Johns.
This article was taken from a post in a discussion about the gender imbalance in parkour. Here, Hannah shares her ideas on how to encourage more female participation. To understand the context that this article was written, you should read the full discussion by clicking here.
From personal experience, it is incredibly difficult being the only girl in a training group, especially if you don’t know many people there. There are two main reasons (that I have come up with) for this:
Cultural/social – the society that we live in makes it very clear what roles male and female persons are supposed to fill. I don’t mean purely in a job sense or anything. Men are expected to act a certain way, walk a certain way, do certain things. Likewise, women are expected to act, talk, behave in certain ways. I’m sure you all know what I mean. The Parkour culture, as it is today, is hugely male-oriented. You just have to look around one of your Sunday classes to see that. For a girl to fit herself into that culture and feel comfortable is so ridiculously hard that it’s not even funny.
Physical – male and female bodies are built differently. They are designed to work in different ways and complete different tasks. Generally speaking, the male body is stronger than the female body because of the different ways that they are built. Parkour was founded and developed by traceurs, and they developed the techniques that were most efficient for them. However, what is most efficient etc. for a guy is not necessarily going to be the most efficient for a girl. The most discouraging and off-putting thing for a girl to see is guys swarming up a wall and expecting them to do the same, when they can hardly reach the top of the wall, let alone pull themselves up it. Traceuses, especially those just starting, need to find ways to overcome challenges and obstacles that work for them. Yelling at them to ‘just do it’ as I’ve had done to me is never going to help. We need to start small, build up our strength, work on our technique, and move forward.
Guys can help with the first issue by toning down the testosterone, being open and friendly, going out of their way to help but not being over bearing, and definitely not hitting on them.
The second issue can be a bit harder to solve. Perhaps if a girl has joined your group for a training session and they are relatively new, you might spend that day in some of the less advanced areas or focusing on more basic techniques. Or your usual techniques, but smaller! Most girls simply do not have the strength or power to do things on the same scale as most guys. And when they do build it up, it takes months, years! whereas a naturally athletic guy might train for a couple of months and be at a high level (technically). This is not to say that you should always lessen what you can do if a girl is training with you, but if they are new you should make the effort to help them enjoy the jam, rather than have them spend it feeling hugely intimidated.
So, if your aim is to get more girls training Parkour, then there is definitely an opportunity in having girls jams/training sessions/classes. In a mainly female environment, girls would have the opportunity to build up their confidence etc (for the above reasons…) so that they can participate in regular jams/classes etc more naturally.
Regarding having female instructors, I think that different situations have different needs.
A girls jam – a jam being defined as a casual hang-out, loose training time, I would say girls only. But, you do not need instructors for a jam. All you need is someone to say to her friends, hey lets have a jam with just us girls, tell your mates.
Training session – a gathering for the purposes of training, but not a class. This could be mixed, male and female, but as a rough guide possibly no less than half girls? Could have a more experienced practitioner acting as a guide, but as long as there are a majority of girls I don’t see why that couldn’t be a guy. Equal numbers would be fantastic.
Girls class – a paid parkour association class, where people come for a specific time to be taught. Of course, ideally you would have at least one female teacher, for reasons you have all discussed. But, I think that the need to have girls classes outweighs the need to have a female instructor teaching them. You wouldn’t pick just any guy to instruct a girls class; maturity and professionalism should be right up there when considering people. Neither should they teach alone, if they have another instructor there they can remind each other about how they should be behaving, relating to the girls etc. If you really feel that there should be a female present, for your own reasons or because you think that some girls might be too uncomfortable without (eg. because of past abuse), approach the local council, church, social service etc. Explain what you want to do and why, present it as a benefit to the community etc, and see if they could get an older woman to volunteer to come and watch and possibly even join in.
Photo by Tony Tsai. tonymtsai.tumblr.com
Related posts:
