Anastasia: Last summer, the word "Together" was added to "faster higher stronger", the old Olympic motto.

So when you watch the Beijing winter Olympics, you have every right to expect equality and inclusion on your screens.

It's Nancy Lee's job to make that happen. She is the advisor to the IOC on gender equality. The former head of CBC Sports, Nancy also ran Olympic Broadcasting services at the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Today, she is going to tell us how to watch the Olympics with an eye for equality.

And if things don't measure up? Nancy will tell you exactly what you can do about it.

It's Player's Own Voice, I'm Anastasia Bucsis

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Anastasia: Thank you so much for joining me. I'm honoured that you want be on the POV podcast. So your official title, let me get this straight, is the IOC adviser on gender equality. So what do you actually do? What does that actually mean?

Nancy Lee: What I do for the IOC is I'm helping them address issues related to gender inequalities within the Olympic Movement. So the Olympic Movement has three kind of groups. It's the International Olympic Committee, the IOC. It's the international sports federations that run sport, make the rules. And then the third group is the two hundred and six. That's unbelievable, 206 Olympic Committees around the world, which the Canadian Olympic Committee is one. So they they bring the IOC hired me in 2016. The value I can bring to them was experience and knowledge that I had in addressing gender equality issues in sport through the CBC and through other avenues of governance and boards that I have been on.

But that, combined with- I have a knowledge and more importantly, maybe, an appreciation of how the Olympic Movement works and who does what, who is responsible for what, how much can the IOC do, how much can they not do? So that kind of combination came together since 2016 in various projects or initiatives, that's what I've been helping them do.

Anastasia: So, OK, I'm watching the Olympics on TV or I'm streaming it. What are you doing to make sure that I see gender equality happening on my screen?

Nancy Lee: If there is a boy and a girl, a brother and sister sitting on a couch in Scarborough watching the Beijing Olympics, it's important that the IOC and all the sports federations has set those games up, so those two little kids watching that can say, I can be that one day, because right now what the IOC is concentrating on and saying, we want 50 50 participants, five thousand women and five thousand men, and I'm saying that's not good enough. So in Beijing, as an example that doesn't work, is it's an event called Nordic combined and it's got cross-country skiing and ski jumping, but it's only available to men and guys. So my point, to the IOC is to say, OK, you know, you've got to work backwards and they have, and they should have had it ready for Beijing. I think it might be ready for Italy and the next Winter Olympics.

The specifics on the television are interesting. What you should see in the opening ceremonies is: the flagbearers that come in for each country. You should be seeing both a male athlete and a female athlete. And that started a couple of years ago again through the executive board. And that started because of a report that we can talk about later. That essentially said, this isn't just about participants in governance, there's so many aspects of it. So another example could be, and this is small and people I don't think would even notice it for the first Winter Games ever. You are not going to see on the screen reference to ladies. It's women's sports.

Anastasia: I Love it I love it. I love it.

Nancy Lee: You were part of it!

Anastasia: I was!

Nancy Lee: your federation for whatever reason was kind of dragging itself and also the skiing federation. So when people are watching the Olympics and they'll see on the bottom of the screen, it's called bottom font and it used to be called like ladies 5000 metres in the speed skating. No more. It's women's. So the conversations that have gone on with them over for this took four years and many more years for me. But for years with the IOC I was saying : if you want to call them ladies, then you've got to call the guys gentlemen. And that's when they got it. They got it. So it took a little bit of time. And I can tell you when I brought this to the attention of the IOC, the guy that was running the games, Christophe Dubi , Irina GladKikh, who runs the winter sport, they wanted to change it immediately for Pyeongchang. It was too late. It was like six months to go so. So for Beijing, we'll see it.

Anastasia: Six months to go? So what like goes into that decision, though? Because I'm thinking, Oh, that's just an easy change. Just stop calling us ladies.

Nancy Lee: The games is locked in 18 months before, and what I mean locked in is we'll talk about the competition schedule, but that's ticketing. That's the we'll talk about. The host broadcaster, too, is everybody's getting prepared, the CBC and everybody else, 18 months at least out. Your programming is essentially figured out what you're going to put on the air, what day, etc. And that's because it's this huge endeavour to create the games. One of the role…the I played out in Vancouver, I was the chief operating officer, as we said, for the host broadcaster and I had to hire, not I, but a group of us hired over 3000 people just to work for three weeks. So we had a group of 200 that blew up to three thousand. And then the day after the games are over, you go back to the two hundred. So it's a a large endeavour and that's why it takes so much time in advance, you know, to figure it out.

Anastasia: We're talking inside shop, so I love it. I feel like a TV nerd right now. But you say host broadcaster, you also said OBS. Can you tell people that might not be a TV insider what the difference between OBS is? What does it stand for? What would you see on OBS versus CBC coverage?

Nancy Lee: OK, so OBS stands for the Olympic broadcasting services and it's a company that is essentially owned by the International Olympic Committee, and it provides the host feed. It's a pool feed, and the reason there's a pool feed coming out of an Olympic Games is there's about a hundred broadcasters from around the world that will show up in Beijing. CBC, Radio-Canada being just one of them, and you've purchased the rights to be able to do that. If all of those hundred broadcasters brought all their cameras and all of their trucks, there would be no room for anything else. So OBS provides the feed, and the simple way to explain it is if you're watching a hockey game from Beijing and you're watching the action on the ice, that is camera work and directors and producers who are hired by OBS to do that coverage, that feed gets given to CBC and BBC and NBC.

Where CBC comes in, is the play by play will be CBC, mostly CBC announcers. The person on the sidelines will be the reporter from CBC. And then of course, you go back to the studios with Scott Russell , that's where they're doing the host. That's all CBC. So if you see and you have issues with how the actual sport is being covered, you will have issues with OBS. If you have issues with what the commentators calling or referring to girls as opposed to women and that sort of thing and asking questions that are just inappropriate to be asked, that's the CBC or an NBC or a BBC thing.

Anastasia: OK, so let's back up from how events are portrayed to whether we see them at all. So scheduling sporting events is I can only imagine a battle that you've had to wage for a few years. Why do schedules matter?

Nancy Lee: They matter for a number of reasons, but the number one is, are you giving the female and the male athletes the same exposure? Are you putting…are you scheduling their events at a time of day that is eight a.m. or nine a.m. in the morning, in the days when people would actually be allowed to go and watch the games? So there's nobody there watching that event versus you've got them on and sort of at seven or eight o'clock at night. So the schedule and a competition schedule and this relates to anybody. We can talk specifically about the Olympic Games and how it's affected in terms of the gender balance, but I mean, I'm still hearing and you probably have too, is the scheduling of municipal rinks and the time on that schedule that's given to the Women's League, the guys league, the young kids, and invariably I'm still hearing that, you know, 10 and 12 year old girls leagues have got games that Wednesday at 10 o'clock at night. The other one that still to this day, 30, more than 30 years since I was at university is the women play at six and the guys play at eight. Why is that? Why can't they? Can't they alternate it?

Anastasia: It's like women are like presented as like the warm up act or something!

Nancy Lee: . That's it. I refer to it as the opening act. And so come back to the sense of the Olympics, and this is a lot of the work that I actually do for them. I'm actually working on the Paris schedule now as we speak. And Paris isn't happening until 2024. But when I first started this work, they were saying, why isn't their media coverage? Why doesn't the sports media cover women? And I had this list of reasons why the sports media and the media don't do it. But what I said to the organizations and this was the IOC and groups like the Commonwealth Games or National, these national federations international federations was you're perpetuating the myth that the women are second class by how you schedule them.

So in the Rio Games, there were two events for women on the last Sunday and there were 10 for the men and the two for the women were rhythmic gymnastics for 90 minutes and one bout of boxing. Versus the men there are 10 events, including the iconic marathon. They had twenty four hours of programming. So when you're at the CBC and you're going to show it, you're showing everything because that's your last time and you're trying to make as much money as possible on that last day of the Olympics. I mean, you're running all of those hours on one of those many networks and you've got two hours of women. So what the again, the fantastic work and this is the IOC sports department that did it along with OBS, it got literally got fixed by Tokyo, and that was phenomenal for me. I did not think that would work. So again, back to my job as I say, Well, if you switched out the volleyball, if you put the women on Sunday and the men on Saturday and essentially go down that competition schedule, then it evens its way out. So the result was that in Tokyo on that final Sunday, there were 13 hours for the men of broadcast available for broadcast and seventeen for the women. And then and the medals,there were eight for the women and five for the men. Again, a bit of an imbalance, but it's a lot better than 2 and 10.

And my last example, for Beijing, as well as for Tokyo. In Beijing, because the women's cross-country, it's their mass start, 30 kilometres is now on the Sunday and the men are on the Saturday. Both of those events will have their medals awarded in the closing ceremonies. And that's important for the media in terms of the audiences, because closing ceremonies around the world is usually the top four, top five audience attraction. So you just you're giving the men and the women that equal access that equal opportunity. So that's kind of why the schedule matters.

Anastasia: So your advice to the IOC is focus your energy, fix the problems you have before attempting new ventures. What are your feelings…I mean, we have seen the emergence of mixed events…what are your feelings there?

Nancy Lee: I think what it would say is that the consistency of my message is: You've got to create the balance and you have to create… just alternate, get it into an alternating games, two games. When the mixed events, when they started to come on board. I think the problem that I can see with it is it's how it was presented. Some of them are terrific to watch. I mean, the doubles curling is just fun. Just terrific to watch and it's fast and all the rest of it. And Canada happened to win the first gold medal of it, which is also good. No pressure for Beijing!

But what's happened in some of the activities or the events that they've put on is I feel that they're just underscoring the differences, not essentially saying it's equal. So I'll give you kind of two examples of it. One is in Tokyo for the Summer Games, in athletics they run a 4x400 metre relay and any of us from public school or high school or wherever we were on a relay, the general and the old traditional way of where you put your weak links is number two and number three. So your fastest could be first or last and then you put the weak links in. Well, guess where the women ran in those relays? They ran second and third position. No problem with that. That's good strategy for running a relay. But really, you have to sort of remind everybody those are your weak links? The other one that's even more blatant that you will see in Beijing is in terms of biathlon. It's a mixed relay. Two men and two women compete, but the men's distance is seven point five kilometres and the women do six. And one of the things we're trying to do within the Olympic movement is have parity of distances, and it's not like the women can't do seven kilometres. They compete on that.

So that's when they say, Oh, we're doing mixed, we're doing … and I'm thinking, that kind of goes back to the point you made is: fix the problems you've got now before you kind of venture in there and then be very careful about what are the events that you put on.

Because one of the the biggest problems that has been a pushback for including more women's events or including more women female athletes at the Olympics. It happened, unfortunately, at the very same, the very same time that the IOC was cutting back and they put this cap on: there will be no more than ten thousand athletes go to the summer games. OK, good. But you're increasing the women. Well, guess what has to happen? And there's been a lot of backlash. A lot of cycling, they lost an awful lot of rowing, some of the canoeing events. So it wasn't… the timing wasn't great. And so that that's why in terms of the mixed, the mix just adds more people. You're giving more accreditations and you're giving more beds and food to more athletes like maybe you. That's not necessary.

Anastasia: Yeah. And yet, women, back in the day. I mean, this was before I was born. I hope, my gosh, I haven't fact checked, but like the concept that women couldn't run a marathon, like even in speedskating. We women can't skate a 10k!

Nancy Lee: No, you're not doing the 10 k yet no.

Anastasia: No. I mean, I don't want to do the 10k, but if you if you're physically fit enough to do that all power to you.

Nancy Lee: Well, your point is and I raise it to speedskaters who say no, we really don't want to do the 10k, are you crazy? ( laughs) But really, I'll give you two examples. 1984 Olympics that's when the women's marathon went first, went first on the schedule and it was just… my background is in swimming and so I'm swimming in the 1960s and 70s. I never swam the mile I did not want to swim a mile, I did 500 metres, but they were swimming in the 1970s. It wasn't until Tokyo, last year, that was the first time that the women swam the 1500.

Anastasia. That's wild.

Nancy Lee: But I mean, there's still lots of problems. There's problems. But I would say problems and inequalities is the number of teams. So in hockey, they call ice hockey because they differentiate between field and ice. It fields 12 and 12. 12 teams both at the Olympics, not ice hockey. The men still have more teams than the women's. Water polo? It's just like, Hello, all of Europe is so competitive, water polo is so competitive and the women, all the European countries could compete, but they don't. They still haven't allowed it. And I'll say this with the IOC, they're working hard on that. Not hard enough and maybe not fast enough.

And so much of this comes down to influencing. What I said before is that they don't set the rules, right? The sports federation set the rules. But the IOC knows that it has ways of influencing change.

Anastasia: So you bring up the IOC, you worked what for over a year on a study regarding gender equality, 25 recommendations came out of that paper. What are some of the good things that came out of those recommendations on paper?

Nancy Lee: I think that that's the number one thing is it didn't get put in a drawer. So I mean, it was…to be perfectly honest I was quite surprised. There's a long list. There's about 10 or 15 things you need to look at. You need to look at the rules, you need to look at the distances. As we spoke about, you need to look at uniforms, you need to look at funding, you need to look at portrayal, you need to do look at governance and and what are you actually putting into writing, like putting it into contracts. There's 40 international sports federations and the two hundred and six Olympic Committees. And part of it was we sent out surveys to both of those groups with questions: What are you doing? Why are you doing this?

The one I liked the best was if your uniforms are different between men and women, what is the reason for it? Is it a health and safety? Is it a sport rule? Is it a technical rule? And there was surprisingly a few groups that said, No, we don't. We don't differentiate. Well, they do. They do differentiate. So some of them didn't even admit to it, and the report is available online at Olympic.org and it's in English and French. So the good news was there were federations like the skiing federation. They sat down in 18 months. A working group of them had made fundamental changes in their core business. So they have a process now that the more women will be involved on the technical committees for all of their disciplines where before no one thought about it, so they did a fantastic job.

World Rugby has always been very, very good. So they just added to it. And then there's just some that you know that they just put it in a drawer. I think that the two things that I would still like to see come out of it is that the IOC take the report and figure out how to tie their funding model -and include gender and fixing the gender imbalances as part of the decision making criteria of how money is funded. Because 90 percent of the IOC's budget, which is huge, goes out to these federations and also to all the National Olympic Committees. So tie that funding somehow to implementing these recommendations. That would that would be the first one.

The second thing I would say is the IOC only deals internationally with the federations. They can't get down into the feeder systems and the feeder systems are the national sports associations. The national sports associations are members of all these international federations and they meet every year. And if they, representing Canada, were to come forward and say, listen, we need to do something about uniforms, event competition, distances, governance, whatever it might be, if they step forward. Many of the IF's are looking for that support coming from the floor. So it's not always top down and it's not happening. It's certainly not happening enough. And so that's kind of a second thing that's sort of more coming from the base forward because the national sports organizations are pivotal. If they're not producing the athletes, if they're not producing the coaches, the technical officials, the administrators, there's nothing. There's no games, there's nobody going to the party.

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Anastasia: So we've talked a lot about the IOC, but let's let's bring it back home. So for Canada, right, I think of the Canadian government. I'm a kid from Calgary. I first and foremost say, I think I've got to go to two Olympic Games because of 1988, living legacy through my veins. Let's talk about Canada and the federal government here. What should the government be doing or what could they be doing better for these taxpayer, big, you know, multi-sport games like the Olympics like FIFA, you know, the World Cup is coming. What could the government be doing better?

Nancy Lee: Inside Sport Canada they have a pool of money that they give out to the national sports organizations. As you say that come forward and say we'd like to have the Pan Am games. We would like to have the Commonwealth Games. We would like to run the World Cycling Championships here, world swimming. All of these events and all the associations come forward and they hand out millions of dollars. It's a lot of money that's attached to it.

What I don't think happens enough and really should is there needs to be a very clear that one of the decision making criteria is whether or not they're going to give the money is what are you doing to ensure that there is gender balance in your event? So what are you doing for the numbers? What are you doing for the events? Where are the venues? This is a media thing. If you have an event and you run, let's just I'm going to say let's pick Pan Am games and you run the basketball men's games right down in downtown Toronto. And meanwhile, the women are in Niagara Falls. (They weren't. I'm just making this as an example.) The media doesn't have the time to go down to Niagara Falls to cover the women's games and that happened actually to the Canadian softball team, in Atlanta. And when CBC was covering it, so where venues are placed again, the Canadian government could say, Give us these specifics, are you treating them equally? Then the key is is to hold them to it and they don't get the money unless they come up with it.

So the example that I think you and I know about is in 2015 World Cup soccer, they, you know, they didn't have the money to change the facilities that had turf to grass, which is preferable, which men at the international level, a global level, they're playing on grass, they're not going put a toe on turf. Whereas for the women, no, it was fine. It was fine for all of those, the number one women in the world. coming to Canada.

And now we said it was OK for some of those games to be played on turf. Back to the Canadian government and to the sponsors that offered the money. There, too, is this is where they need to step up. And when I'm talking about, you know, passing the buck, this is to be fair to everyone. They will say, if you say to the Pan Am games, no, You want to run rowing, you have to have the same numbers of rowers. Well, we would like to have the same number of rowers, but the International Rowing Federation. That's not how they run the rules. They have more events for the for the men than women. Well, change it. Well, we can't change it. Well, in fact they can. They can influence the change.

And so what I was going back to before was in the sense of saying, OK, we're going, No, we would like to run an event here in Canada, the Canadian government says, What are you doing? Said, Well, we're going to do this, but there's a little bit of a problem in some of these sports. They don't have equal, so we'll give you the money. You go back to them and say Canada wants to put in a bid and a proposal for these games, but here are our conditions and the reasons it can work. Some of these games are so huge and we know Pan Am the Olympics is another example. It's, they're so big that nobody wants to bid on them. Nobody can afford them. So they actually go out and they're looking for host cities to come on board to bid. So there is leverage, you do have a point of influence. And I will go back to that little example that I used about the switch in cross-country skiing at the Olympic Games? My heavens. That's been going on for 50 years. If that can get changed in all the tradition, that's beside that? It took two or three people to make that happen. And that's why I do believe the Canadian government needs to stand up as the provinces do for when they're asked money for the same thing. And I'll kind of finish my mini rant on this one.

Anastasia: I love it. Keep going.

Nancy Lee: It goes back to the municipalities and the hockey time. It's just it's public money. We're in Canada. We should treat the female and the male athletes equally the same, and the public needs to count on the government to do it. So when you're not seeing it, you're out there in the ice times, not, you know, not equal. The first group I would go to is your representative and say, What are you doing about this? No more excuses.

Anastasia: But it's so easy to just talk about athletes, though, and this is so much more than just athletes. It's technical officials, it's coaches. What is the connection between the Olympic representation of women, female coaches and officials and the grassroots?

Nancy Lee: I'm going to say nothing, and that's part of the challenge. But I will answer that in the sense of saying what the challenge is. So in the report, going back to the recommendations…I have to fess up is I put in technical officials and coaches. Broadly, it's like this needs to be reviewed. And for two reasons. At that level, it had never been looked at and the IOC was very reluctant, really reluctant to put them down there because it said, we can't do anything about it. How can we put a recommendation down and stand by it if we truly can't facilitate it and make more female coaches be assigned to the games or have more female technical officials?

And so I took the idea from a fellow named Bruce Robertson, who's another Canadian who the year before I did the work at the IOC, he was doing the exact same thing for the Commonwealth Games Federation and coming up with the gender equality strategy for them. And in talking to all the Canadians,Lorraine Lafreniere, from coaching association, all of them sort of said, you've got to put it on the table, at least have the conversation. So the IOC got that. So I said, let's just put it on there. Let's have a review. Let's figure it out later.

So the tie in is, is what we talked before about the pipeline and the pathway. So the coaches that end up coaching at that level are coming out of club level, community level, all of the coaches, start there. They're going through, the universities, they're going through the provinces and being assigned at the national level. So that's where the connection exists.

So the example that Commonwealth did in Gold Coast back in 2018 is they ran a programme round the world, people, any women could apply for it. They had to be supported by the Commonwealth Games Association and essentially they were mentored. And what happened is these 20 women went to the Gold Coast. They were there for the two weeks of competition and what happened, I wasn't sure about the Canadians but it did happen in Africa. The head coach of those teams saw these women, saw they can do it. So these women now got assigned to go to World Cups and international events, and all it was was opening the window.

So back to your question about what can the IOC do? The IOC, what it can do is open the door. And the door and the access door is to say, come to the Olympics. So that's kind of the conversation that's going on. But it's all about the pathway and it's about accommodation. And so for technical officials, I met a fellow who was responsible for the officials for Basketball Canada, and he said I needed more officials. The women were a perfect pool to be technical officials, former athletes, former basketball player. But he said they couldn't get to the games, so he said I went and picked them up. So it was accommodation. A carpool to get them to go to the games.

The other one was about the coaching and this is the University of Toronto for many, many years, Michelle Belanger was the women's basketball coach, and the accomodation that she and her family made, as well as the university is, her kids came between four and six when she was running those programmes. And they did their homework in the stands. And so they grew up courtside. And again, it's a small accommodation, but it's an important one, and it allowed Michelle to be there in the presence and have that head coach position.

So there's many, many examples of this, and I think Canada is it is a huge leader in it and you probably be aware the Canada games and what they have done. And for people who don't know is what Canada game started many years ago, is every two years there's a competition run Canada games, summer and winter, and it goes to a different location in the territories and provinces across the country. But what they stipulated that if you're going to have athletes come and participate in that sport and you want to bring two coaches, one has to be of the other gender. So you can't have two women can't have two men. And I'm being told by coaching Canada, it's phenomenal how that initiative actually has created and developed female coaches that would not be part of that province or the national scene unless that it occurred.

Anastasia: Canada Games is the best. It is one of the most significant events that I have had the privilege of participating in and it birthed my dreams in a way that I never thought like. It's just such a lovely stepping stone. So it's great to hear that Canadians are working, you know, at that level and and paving the path. We are two minutes away from Beijing. So I first want to say thank you for having this conversation. But what would you like audience members or those that are watching the Olympics to know or to think about while they're watching the Olympics in Beijing?

Nancy Lee: Well, it would be terrific if they all did kind of analyses of it and submitted them. But I think part of it may be is just kind of an awareness and listening to this and sort of my friends and family is when you talk to them about this, oh yeah. Oh yeah, they get it. So all I would say is it gives you kind of like a reason. Another reason to look at the games is to say how, how how are the athletes being covered?

Is it balanced or are you seeing the same number of photos are the images you're seeing the following images you're seeing fair? Are the men always in action and the women always crying at the podium, like that. And when they say, well, so what? They can make a difference. I mean, if they if the audience doesn't like how the CBC, you and all the other commentators are covering the game, I literally believe in pick up the phone, and I say, pick up the phone. No one picks up the phone, everybody texts. So your text, as far as I'm concerned, gets lost, text and tweet. If you want to make a difference, pick up the phone and find out the producers and they're there and they will answer,after the Olympics are over. You can make a difference. I know when I was there and head of the department, if I got two or three calls, there was a meeting and it was like, What is going on here? Why did that happen? So the audience can make a difference! And if they don't see the men, the women are being treated the same. Let the CBC know, and you can also let Olympic Broadcasting No, too through the CBC.

Anastasia: There you have it. I appreciate your time so much, your insights, so much. I wish that we could continue this for a few hours or…we probably won't see each other in Beijing. We'll both in caves. I'll be in the studio all day, every day.

Nancy Lee: Well, listen, thank you for the invitation. I really enjoyed it.

Anastasia: Thank you, Nancy. peace

Nancy Lee: Bye bye.

Anastasia: Nancy and I zoomed one another from opposite sides of the greater Toronto area.

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Beijing, here we come...