eugem

Things we are tired to hear/witness:

  • “For women it is easier to win”

  • “With that body, you should cover yourself”

  • "the best thing to happen in Ultimate is the invention of short shorts"

  • "Mixed is like playing 4 a-side with 3 obstacles in the way"

  • "She's really good, for a girl"

  • “Let the guy/X pull, guys can throw further”

  • "I rather play with a beautiful girl than with a good one"

  • “You play like a man”

Welcome to the European Ultimate Gender Equity Manual (EUGEM)!

This manual shall feature helpful good practices, real-life stories (where practices were tested or experiences are shared) as well as other initiatives (like the gender equity handbook from the Flying Rabbitts (Bruxeles) or the Gender Equity Tournament Toolkit from WFDF - World Flying Disc Federation) to introduce, develop and grow Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in all sports but especially Ultimate. The project was accepted and financed by the Erasmus+ Initiative in 2020 and has an official finalization date in October 2022. That being said it shall live on and grow until after that date. We want to create a legacy and platform for all topics related to DEI.

If you have ideas, articles, stories that are missing and that would help the manual and ultimately the community in growing the knowledge please don’t hesitate and share it.

With the European Ultimate Gender Equity Manual (EU-GEM), coaches learn how to enable more females to play Ultimate in Europe. With equity, each target audience is assessed separately, and a program is developed and implemented to bring those groups to the desired "finish line". While the sport of Ultimate promotes equality, we currently face an issue with gender equity given the low number of visible female leaders and coaches and fewer female players compared to male in our sport within Europe.

A team of partners has been identified due to their expertise in building and executing Ultimate coaching programs and their dedication towards gender equity. These proposed themes are modified to be specific to the sport of Ultimate from the methodology offered in the Strengthening Coaching with the Objective to Raise Equality (SCORE) Gender Equality in Coaching Toolkit. We selected this toolkit as it explicitly targets how to create gender equality in coaching. The EUF's Chair of the Gender Equity Committee, Heidi Pekkola, led the team who built the SCORE toolkit. The four themes of EU-GEM will be focused on assessing what a gender equity plan should be for the upcoming Ultimate season and how best to recruit, train and retain female Ultimate players in Europe. The manual is written in a wiki-style so that it is easily accessible to everyone and everywhere. Its collection reaches up to 80 good practices and can be grown indefinitely because of the technical infrastructure. The 15 real-life stories make the practices relatable, and the glossary helps streamline the topic's understanding as well as the language and definitions.

In order to review these good practices, we were able to recruit up to 60 reviewers from within the community—the largest engagement in EUF history on such a call. https://eugem.ultimatefederation.eu/

This project tackles constraints by empowering European Ultimate coaches to further enable female athletes in the sport. A team of experts will be drawn to build and test a European Ultimate Gender Equity Manual (EU-GEM). We redesigned the EUF website with a dedicated space where the EU-GEM is shared. This will ensure more seamless communication across Federations and the European Ultimate community as a whole.

The Self Assessment tool was created to enter the jungle of articles. It was essential to ensure that interested coaches were able to find articles and knowledge quickly. The Assessment tool features three hierarchies (Coach, Team and Organisation), and within each hierarchy, 5 Categories are inspired by the (in Ultimate) well-known Spirit of the Game assessment:

  • Gender Equity Knowledge and Use: Learn about gender equity and broaden your horizon. Get challenged by new ideas and learn what you don't know.

  • Violations and incidents: Information about the well-needed infrastructure to handle incidents and information on how to manage group discussions.

  • Gender Equity Fairness and Open-Mindedness: how to foster new initiatives and distribute equitably.

  • Gender Equity Positive attitude and environment: learn how to create an atmosphere where everyone feels welcome and appreciated.

  • Communication, Media Presence and Recruiting: highlighting what is important to say and why language is essential in all of this. Describing equal or even extra exposure for female athletes.

These categories are directly linked to good practices. https://www.ultimatefederation.eu/self-assessment-tool