We shared stories in a lecture theatre, each woman taking their turn to tell the group about times when exercise was hard - the years they’d lost mornings and evenings to nappies or felt their cheeks burn burgundy every time they walked into the gym - and when it was good: the running group where there was no back of the pack or the time they punched a boxing bag and it felt like their anger left their body via their fist.
Now, the results of our chat - and many hundreds of others similar to ours - are published as part of Asics’ Move Her Mind, the largest piece of research ever done on women’s barriers to movement. It showed that all women, in pretty much every country, age bracket, race and ability, will experience a barrier to exercise throughout their lifetime. Right now, over half of women are not exercising as much as they would like to and 51% of women reported decreasing or stopping exercise as they got older, the study also found. You don’t need me to tell you why that matters but just in case: among the too-many-to-list benefits of moving, exercise was shown to make women 52% happier and 38% more able to deal with life.
But I don’t want to talk to you about how to exercise more. I don’t think you need to hear about ways to feel more confident in the gym or how you can exercise snack your way to fitness with a few squats here and a few press ups there throughout your day. Because most of the things stopping us from moving more aren’t intrinsic problems - and I’m sick of being told we have to find the solution to a mess we didn’t create.
So what is stopping us? Well, Asics’ report found that the top five barriers to entry are time and other commitments; the cost of movement; unsafe or unwelcoming environments; not feeling fit or sporty enough and a lack of access to exercise equipment and spaces. And these issues all boil down to wider gender inequality and failures on a much larger scale than wearing baggy t-shirts or big headphones - two of the frequently touted tips for beating gymtimidation - will fix. And yet, there’s an ignorance to the problem, as Asics’ study found men could only identify one of the top five barriers to exercise for women - cost - and instead assumed the main thing holding us back from exercising more was body insecurities - an objectification and irresponsibility that’s rampant in the fitness world.
On the surface, the still-very-male-dominated nature of sport and exercise means every woman I know has been mansplained or hit on in the gym. Safety concerns mean women can’t run or walk in the dark, shrinking the time frame in which we can move when compared to men. But this is much bigger than individual behaviour. It’s that we live in a world where women are already so comparatively time-constricted that exercise has to slide: in the office, we have to work harder to be taken as seriously in corporate jobs (one study suggests even though we perform better at work we are 14% less likely to be promoted each year) and the gender pay gap that means we work two months a year for free. At home, responsibilities fall exponentially on women: nearly half of working-age women do 45 hours of unpaid care every week alongside their full-time jobs.
Menstrual cycles, chronic illnesses and the health gap also make consistent movement so hard for so many of us whose bodies are already a battleground. And the general industry of moving our bodies is simply not set up for women, as Christine Yu, author of Up To Speed, told
recently: “Men are the norm in the sport and women are the outliers. The whole structure, cultures, and experience of sport was developed around the experience of boys and men.” Her work looks at the brilliance of female athletes including the erasure of women in sport and exercise, like how our bodies are still virtually unstudied: only 6% of sports science research between 2014-2020 focused exclusively on women. It is no surprise that contorting ourselves to follow regimes based on bodies and structures that are different from ours can feel so uncomfortable and uninspiring.All of this and yet certain (male) influencers still go viral for their allegedly ‘no bullshit’ and ‘honest’ takes on ‘prioritisation’ and ‘routine’ that suggest women’s own mindsets are to blame - spoken as though the roadblocks of gender discrimination, sexualisation, the constant assumption that you are a beginner or uneducated at exercise and balancing workloads and family responsibilities alongside movement are just gates we can open with enough willpower.
Asics’ study showed just how much work needs to go into closing the exercise gap. It will require the re-education of an entire industry - we need gyms built to support women’s bodies and lifestyles, with crèches and flexible memberships and safe spaces (not, I might add, solely women-only spaces). We need research and investment put into women’s healthcare so we know how to create a relationship with movement that helps our bodies thrive. We need to end the consistent, second-nature objectification of women’s bodies and the stereotyping of us as less knowledgeable or natural when it comes to exercise. We need caregiving and homemaking responsibilities to be paid and respected. We need to create a narrative for movement that doesn’t always revolve around fat loss and aesthetics. We need much more support than articles that suggest doing a shy girl workout.
Look, it’s not that I think that any women-specific advice on how to exercise more is pointless. Of course these hacks and tricks can empower individual women to find ways around their schedule or cost concerns and help them move more. But the continued emphasis on women finding solutions to systemic problems that they did not create is dull and dangerous. Like in so many areas of our lives, we’ve been continuously judged for not excelling within a shitty system. Told that we must do better for our bodies and minds but handed pseudo-tools that require more physical and mental fight to use. Like the Asics report said, ‘Women are driving change, but while progress is being made, more can be done’. I’d add to that: more needs to be done by people other than women.
Thank you for reading Gray’s Anatomy. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one - who is responsible for closing the gender gym gap? How do you think we do it?
Really interesting thanks for sharing and agree with so much of this and what needs to be done. The UK’s women and equalities committee recently produced a report for govt looking at barriers to women participating in sport which had some similar findings. Particularly on specific challenges of time and that we need to support women into sport in different ways rather than not fully understanding and acknowledging that. (Links to the report are in my newsletter from a few weeks back: https://open.substack.com/pub/futurefemhealth/p/sequel-vs-tampax-removing-sport-barriers?r=tvr9p&utm_medium=ios)