Sports Technology Awards Launches Category Dedicated to Women’s Sports Performance
‘Best Technology for Women’s Sports Performance’ Launched for 2020
The past year has seen professional women’s sports take a huge leap forward in achieving parity with the men, especially in football and rugby. Whilst this is an exciting and positive step, it does prompt greater demands and expectations on even more women as they strive to join the growing professional elite.
Biology and biochemistry renders females more vulnerable to injury and longer periods of rehab, therefore it has never been more important to explore and promote technologies which have been specifically designed to help women athletes. Because of this the Sports Technology Awards have introduced the category of ‘Best Technology for Women’s Sports Performance’ into the 2020 process (now open for entries).
Rebecca Hopkins, CEO of The STA Group, which owns the Sports Technology Awards explained: ‘We have long been passionate advocates of all forms of equality within every aspect of our work, especially gender. Earlier this year we started hearing from the female athletes in our network that they were using – and valuing – technologies such as period trackers and innovative materials to improve breast support so we were exploring the viablility of a dedicated category for women’s tech then.’
She continued: ‘However the decisive moment for us was when Women in Football challenged us with a #Whatif pledge. Initially designed to change the landscape for women in football, we loved the idea and immediately saw an opportunity to match their challenge with our ideas – and hence this category was launched.’
Ebru Köksal, Chair of Women in Football and one of the 2020 Sports Technology Awards judges, added ‘The type of pledge that the Sports Technology Awards has given us via the #Whatif campaign is exactly the level of commitment we were hoping to achieve. This is a really important area of all sports, not just football; women athletes are relatively vulnerable to injury when compared to their male counterparts so anything which lessens risk and supports players and coaches is most welcome.’
The Sports Technology Awards are open for entries under 4th December 2019; full details about the awards can be found at www.sportstechgroup.org or by calling the Awards office on +44 (0) 20 3198 2770.
