Athena SWAN and the Sports Nutritionist
20 Oct
Guest post by Dr Trevor Simper, Athena SWAN Champion for Food Technology
Have you ever Googled Women in sports nutrition? Don’t; it won’t return what you want – which is of course to see whether there are any women working in sports nutrition. I googled because: (a) I am (some of the time) a sports nutritionist, (b) 85% of the students I teach sports nutrition to are female, and (c) my colleagues and friends working in sports nutrition are almost exclusively male… So I wondered if there was a statistic or anecdote outside my own experience which would yield an answer to what the male/female ratio of sports nutritionists is. Unfortunately it is not the sort of statistic that interests the Office for National Statistics. What I got from my Google search is, of course, offers for miracle weight loss, adverts for protein powder and advice (largely from men) on how to ensure nutritional adequacy in the female athlete.
I do know some female sports nutritionists – and the most prominent of those working in mainstream media is Anita Bean https://twitter.com/anitabean. At a chance meeting at the Association for Nutrition’s annual general meeting, I asked Anita whether she would come to talk to Hallam and talk about her work with a view to inspiring women and men interested in the area. Anita writes for Good Housekeeping and is working on her latest (8th) edition of the Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition; a copy of which will be found under every sport science or sports nutrition student’s bed. Anita – as the 8th edition of this, the most popular of her numerous books suggests – has been involved in nutrition for a while. Besides Sport Nutrition she and I also share the past experience of being competitive body-builders, although, like the writing, I think she was a little more successful than I (think national titles versus Novice Mr Burton on Trent and you get the idea).
Alongside Anita, it seemed having a sports nutritionist who has trodden the same path as our undergraduates would perfectly fit the bill, so I also invited Sheffield Hallam graduate Jennie Carter https://twitter.com/MissCarter_100 who studied here a couple of years ago and has since filled her CV by working with professional athletes including athletes from rugby, cricket and football. She also works as a weight management advisor for the NHS. It wasn’t easy; Jennie tells a story of having to do a lot of work for free (which she could scarce afford to do) in order to get paid employment, and this notion is backed up by Anita who also suggests it is important to ‘give just a little bit away free‘ when you are starting out freelance. The two women in fact told similar stories to a packed audience of Hallam Undergraduates and staff. Throughout their presentations, both related to the good (working with motivated and diverse people) and the bad (managing self-employed time and chasing invoices); they are separated perhaps mostly by experience and so I look forward to tracking Jennie’s career and inviting Anita back to Hallam alongside other emerging sports nutritionists both female and male in the years to come. Come to think of it I’ll phone finance re: those invoices….
Links:
http://www.shu.ac.uk/university/overview/diversity/athena-swan/athena-swan-sheffield.html
