UKLA Chair blog #26

In my early years of ILCA/ Laser sailing in the eighties, there was only one rig – the standard or ILCA7 and that didn’t give much opportunity for female participation. Well, things have improved since then, but there is still a lot more to do done.

The ILCA6 has been the women’s single-handed boat in the Olympics for four cycles starting in Beijing 2008. As it happened with the ILCA7, the competition gets tougher each cycle, as many of the earlier campaigners stay involved in subsequent cycles as can be seen with some of the top female sailors now. The ILCA6 is (arguably) the most competitive dinghy class in the UK, being the popular single-handed boat for youths, mixing it with our top women sailors and experienced masters. But the numbers of women competing are just not enough.

Also, in the ILCA4 we have a highly competitive class with more girls competing and a smaller rig opening the opportunity to a wider group of sailors. With seven UKLA National weekend events during the season, the National Championship during the summer and the opportunity to compete abroad (there were 132 entries in the 2022 ILCA4 Youth Europeans in the girls fleet), surely we should be aspiring to having equal numbers of boys and girls in this fleet?

So today UKLA are launching a survey on female participation in the ILCA as part of our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity strategy. We are interested in understanding whether there is more that we can do to increase female participation in ILCA 4 and 6. This survey is mainly aimed at female sailors, but if you are a male and have a view on this subject, we welcome your input. Here is the survey

Snippets:

All the best

Mark

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march23Mark Lyttle