Aiming to take every chance to empower women in sport, GIS is delighted to have been joined by Misha Sher and Gen Dohrmann in our latest GIS Insight Series event about women in sport, hosted by Lynsey Hooper.
With the industry being a fast-evolving one, it is imperative that we continue to highlight opportunities that come up, and this is something Misha and Gen spoke about at length during the webinar.
One of the roles that Misha has seen rapid growth in is the sporting performance area. “I think as women's sport becomes much more of a professional environment, the opportunity to work in that space, whether that's with teams or individual athletes, is going to grow significantly.
“In men's sport, that's quite developed, but in the women's game, if you think about where that's going to go in different countries and different sports over the next couple of years, that's going to be massive.”
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Misha then mentioned another field, this time a more creative one, where he sees a potential for growth. “This idea of creating content around talent and creating media type businesses around individuals is only going to grow, right?
“We just spoke about, going forward, how influential these female athletes are going to be. They're going to need people around them that can capture, package, and tell a story in a way that can grow the audience and in a way that can engage and leverage these partnerships that these athletes are going to get.
“I've seen a lot of that in the men's game, you have photographers or videographers that travel around and spend a lot of time with the athlete. That will happen with female athletes as well. So if you're into a more creative field, I think it's a really, really interesting space.”
Gen then encouraged anyone listening to dream big, and she dreams of seeing more women in senior leadership roles like herself. “I've worked my way up from being a digital communications coordinator in netball through to marketing and communications, then marketing and commercial, then general manager of marketing and then into that CEO role. So it can be done.”
When asked about the evolution of how sport is followed, Misha feels there’s an opportunity to take advantage of the new generations supporting players as individuals more than ever.
“Fans are getting to know the individuals much more, and are developing some sort of a connection to the individual much more than they do to a particular team. These individuals share their lives and they become role models for a lot of young people, so it's not so much that they support Manchester United- they fall in love with Alessia Russo because she played for England and now she moved to Arsenal, they moved to Arsenal.
“That's an opportunity because these women have so much influence and there's so many ways in which you can tap into working with a female athlete, to tell a really powerful story as a brand, and oftentimes, again, it annoys me that we miss that.”
With his marketing background, Misha then drew attention to the importance of selling women’s sport as a product, saying “When you invest, when you want to create a proper product around the women's game, people will come and people will watch it.”
As for the future, Gen spoke about how positive the trajectory of women’s sport is looking.
“We've seen so much growth in the last 10 years. So I think in the next five years, we're going to continue to see that. I'm hoping that a lot of those semi-professional contracts that we've got for a lot of our domestic league athletes can become more professional and full-time. I just think that that would make such a difference to the quality of the sport.”
On this, Misha thought more of the same. “I think what we'll see is growth of women's sports in non-traditional markets. I completely agree with Gen- I think the professional game will continue to grow in the sports and in countries where that's already started.
“But I think in places in South America, the Middle East, in five years’ time, you will have, let's say, a professional football league in Colombia, and places like that.”
To learn more about our upcoming Insight Series sessions, click here, and to read on about women in sport here at Global Institute of Sport, click here.
Article by Zak Anani
