Stephanie Hilborne

"The expectations and gender stereotyping start at birth."

"We’ve got to support women in sport, but we need everyone to be participating."

"The resistance to change comes because it feels like something has been taken away from them."

"There’s no reason why a male coach can’t learn to be brilliant at supporting girls and women through all of those different things that they won’t have experienced themselves."

"With me, I think it’s just always trying to step away so that I can see what’s actually important."

"I think we see that the increased coverage has had a big impact. We need to remember that when we last looked at this, three or four years ago, about 4% overall of sports coverage was of women. We saw from your earlier evidence that the BBC now says that 30% of its coverage is female, although that still means twice as much is men’s. We know that there has been an impact. At the elite level there has been a shift: interestingly, it has been in cricket, rugby and football, which were the traditionally male team sports"

"There is still some coverage of netball, but virtually none. That was the major team sport for girls—and hockey, of course—before we were allowed to play those other big three sports. There still needs to be change at the top but, yes, that movement is very exciting. It is actually moving, for all of us who have been so frustrated by this."

"The culture is slow to shift, though, isn’t it? The shift has not yet happened; we still have this heavy, early years stereotyping meaning that, on arriving at school, girls have less ability to throw, kick and catch a ball than boys."

"We do a lot to try to catch boys up with their fine motor skills when they join school, because they tend to be behind with writing, but we should be making sure that generalist primary teachers are fully aware that the girls are arriving with lower skills in sporting areas, so that there is extra to make up for that."