On 8 March, Sport England’s long-running and award-winning ‘This Girl Can’ initiatives rolled out a new phase in the form of a launching an image library of pictures showing diversity of women being active.
The rights-free photographs – which all feature women of all different sizes and ages all being active and playing sport – are free to download.
The launch leveraged ‘International Women’s Day’ and continued to drive home positive and authentic messages around showing how women and girls really look while playing sport and getting physically active.
The new phase of the initiative follows new research showing women find often unrelatable images of slim, toned bodies of women exercising – especially on social media. The survey found that 63% of women report that seeing slim, toned bodies on social media sites has a negative impact on them.
The campaign, run in-house at Sport England and funded by the National Lottery, has launched the resource to help address the misrepresentation of images used in marketing and the media.
Kate Dale, the campaign lead for This Girl Can, said the objective was to improve the diversity of images available.
“Our aim is to inspire women to become more active and showcase the many fantastic ways they can do so,” explained Dale. “We know there are barriers women have to exercise, fears of judgement and feeling that they will fail. We are encouraging behavioural change, which can be difficult if women’s misconceptions are often reinforced on a daily basis by the imagery they view in media, advertising and online.”
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This campaign follows on from previous phases of #ThisGirlCan including waves of work from September 2020, January 2020, October 2018, February 2017, January 2015 and November 2014, plus Australia’s own version of the project, as well as other Sport England campaigns such as its pandemic-related ‘Join The Movement’ initiative and para-sport focused ‘We Are Undefeatable’.
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