We need to appreciate that girls will always worry about how they look, but our solutions and approach to conversations have to focus on how they feel, which is often not visible. Understanding the products available, what is going to work best, as well as ensuring girls have access to try them is crucial.
White kit
In football in 2022 some clubs, like Manchester City Women, moved away from wearing white shorts, after players spoke up about being uncomfortable. It’s a problem. Research shows that over 64% of school-age girls will stop playing sport by their mid-teens, primarily because of period pain and shame, and a further study by Women in Sport earlier this year revealed that a remarkable 70% admitted they avoid sport while menstruating. For those girls who experience heavy periods every month (which is about 30%), there’s just too many days when light kit won’t work.
And it’s not just players that have issues. Officials, for example, are often put in white kit to run the line. For these women, often in midlife, the perimenopausal menstrual cycle becomes hard to predict and periods can become increasingly irregular and unexpectedly heavy. Those same fears from our early menstruating years can easily return in later years.
The fix
- Changing kit so that girls and women can feel more confident when playing or officiating on their period
- Changing kit completely is tricky when there are sponsors, supply contracts, official kit regulations, costs and tradition to consider. Women playing tennis at Wimbledon spent years trying to get permission to wear dark coloured undershorts beneath their regulation white kit before finally succeeding in 2022.
- So if changing kit isn’t possible, or not wanted, then allowing girls to wear dark-coloured cycling shorts or leggings under dresses, skirts, skorts and shorts can make a huge difference.
“Unisex”
Treating women as smaller men is never the answer. And simply changing the name of a certain style to unisex, without changing much about the design, doesn’t magically make it a better fit for a female.
Women have smaller shoulders. Women have breasts. Women have smaller waists, wider hips and rounder bottoms than men. In unisex kit that hasn’t been properly cut for the female shape, we often see girls and women having to buy bigger sizes to get the width they need in the hips or chest. In the right size, unisex kit is often too tight for breasts and bottoms, or it bunches in the wrong places.
The fix
- Buy female-fit kit: designed-for women, not adapted-to women.
- Despite skorts being exclusively worn by women, they’re often based on a male short design with a skirt feature popped on top in a faceless factory somewhere. So yes, even skorts are commonly shy on room for hips and bums.
Here’s a simple eyeball test to assess kit fit: lay it out flat on a table. Make sure the outline isn’t box-like or straight. Make sure it has extra fabric and / or that its cut will accommodate hips and bums. On tops, make sure there’s excess fabric around the bust to accommodate your breasts. Capped sleeves are another warning sign, and there should be decent width at the hem of a t-shirt to allow for hips. Iif there isn’t, the top will gather and bunch.
Tracksuit bottoms
It’s pretty common to see females rolling over the tops of their tracksuit bottoms in order to cope with excess material in the crotch. An excessive crotch-to-waistband measurement with no variation on leg length is an obvious telltale that trackie bottoms are made to a male design … or at least not to a female one.
We know that limited size options, often driven by minimum orders at the factories making them, are generally to blame for this and we know girls and women tend to have a bit of a just make do attitude with items like tracksuit bottoms. No-one forces us to wear them and we can simply roll them up.
But still, in many ways they’re a critical part of kit; especially for warming up and cooling down. Why should we have to compromise?
The fix
- Rather than boys’, men’s or unisex fit, opt for ladies- fit tracksuit bottoms. These will have a shorter rise from crotch to waistband, so no need to roll over to eliminate excess fabric. They’ll also be designed to fit the hips rather than the waist, and even better if they come in a selection of leg lengths.
Shoes and boots
Girls and women’s feet are different from mens. They are shorter and narrower, and the forces they have to content with coming from the body through to the ground, are also different, since women tend to be lighter, have shorter limbs and less muscle. So when trainers, court shoes or football and rugby boots have not been designed for females, they are not appropriate kit for girls and women to be wearing. At best, they won’t provide a good fit, be uncomfortable and slow us down; at worst, they increase the risk of injury.
The fix
- Look for women’s trainers which fit the shape and dimensions of your feet, and offer both flexibility and generous cushioning.
- Test several brands and even different sizes - Watch for how the heels behave as you jump and especially as you run uphill. If the shoes slip up and down even slightly it’s a red flag. This is only going to get worse as you break the shoes in