Why more women should row
1 December 2014
Holly Redford-Jones, Women’s Captain for Hertford College Boat Club, writes about the recent success of Hertford’s female rowers, and why more women should get involved in rowing:
Hertford’s women are off to a flying start this academic year – having already been crowned champions of the Isis after winning Autumn Fours earlier this term, we have high hopes for the future.
Next year is looking to be even more exciting for women’s rowing, as HCBC Women get set to make an even bigger splash. For the first time in the 185-year history of The Boat Race, on 11 April the women’s race will be held concurrently with the ‘traditional’ men’s race on the Championship Course. This historic move has been a long time in the making. Given the chance and encouragement, we begin to see how successful, how engaging and how rewarding women’s sport can be – most recently, for example, in the successful coverage of women’s football.
As we celebrate 40 years of co-education at Hertford we are reminded of just some of the great things Hertford women have gone on to do in only four short decades; we already have our fair share of great sportswomen in our hall of fame – the portrait of world champion rower Steph Cullen hangs impressively in our display in Hall. And there is more than just a token semblance of equality – women really are doing better than ever before, not least in terms of higher education, where females outnumber male students. Yet the equality we achieve in education seems not to translate into the jobs market; women in boardrooms, in directorships and in representative politics remain a rarity rather than commonplace. Of a total of 170 higher education vice-chancellors, only 35 are women – a statistic echoed in the number of female JCR and MCR presidents across the Oxford colleges. Why does the gender gap still exist and how can rowing narrow the gap?
To succeed in rowing you have to push yourself, to take the risk, to be willing to give all. When the cannon goes, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve sat in a boat and perfected your stroke, how many practice sessions you have never missed. On race day, all that counts is how you make the boat move; how fast you can whip the blade through the water, how long you can hold your hand to the flame. Rowing encourages in young women something absent from other parts of our lives, a competitiveness rich in the messages we send to young men but lacking in our words of advice to women. Before discovering rowing at Hertford I had never been asked to give everything I had; so long as you turned up, worked hard and were a reliable team player that was enough. But not in rowing – to really make a boat move it takes more.
Although women are often inherently team players – rowing has the potential to open up a whole new category of female experience and a new female role model, one whose ambition and drive is not politely hidden behind a mask or painted-on face. When Hertford’s women are out on the Isis, I see a bedrock of women driven to success in a way so often frowned on in real life. On the water you can’t be passive, or tentative. Ambition is overt; determination and fervour are key.
Encouraging that prerequisite of grit and determination that it takes to row across the board in young women is part of the action we must take to address the gender imbalance in the workplace. Women need to be pushing themselves forward: many women rowers are technically expert, just as in the wider world, but when push comes to shove, the crew that pushes themselves to the edge, sets their ambitions high and their inhibitions low will emerge victorious, whether or not they are the most technical, diligent or otherwise hard working.
We could do worse than encourage more young women, the directors, vice chancellors and entrepreneurs of the future, to row. It is with that same grit and drive that I hope we will all encourage and support HCBC’s women through to a successful 2015.
You can read updates and race reports from all the Hertford rowing teams on the Hertford College Boat Club website.