Debates about equality in sport tend to concentrate on visible things: prize money, broadcast coverage, sponsorship. Those matter, particularly at elite level.
Below elite level, where almost everyone actually plays, the binding constraints are duller. They are about when the pitch is available, whether the lights work, where you get changed, and who pays for the coach to the away fixture.
The scheduling question
Facilities are shared and demand exceeds supply, so someone decides who plays when. Those decisions are usually historical rather than deliberate — a fixture pattern established decades ago and never revisited.
Audits of facility allocation in schools and community clubs have repeatedly found that the most desirable slots — after school on weekdays, mid-morning weekends, indoor space in winter — are disproportionately allocated to boys' and men's teams, with girls' and women's teams receiving early morning, late evening, or off-peak slots.
The consequences are not symbolic. A training session at nine in the evening excludes younger players and anyone without transport. A session on an unlit pitch in winter cannot happen at all after October. A team allocated indoor space only when it is not wanted by anyone else loses a large share of its winter programme to weather.
Participation rates respond to these constraints in the obvious way.
Changing facilities
This recurs in the research on adolescent drop-out with a consistency that ought to have produced more action than it has.
Many facilities were designed at a time when they were expected to be used by one sex, and they were adapted rather than rebuilt. The result is frequently a single changing space used in rotation, inadequate privacy, and toilets that are either distant or shared.
For an adolescent girl in the period of maximum self-consciousness, this is a significant and entirely practical barrier. It is cited directly in qualitative research on why girls stop playing.
It is also expensive to fix, which is why it appears in every report and few budgets.
Travel, kit and the money that is not there
Comparisons of budgets between boys' and girls' programmes at the same institution have repeatedly found differences in travel provision, kit quality and replacement cycles, coaching hours purchased, and access to strength and conditioning support.
These differences are frequently defended on the basis of participation numbers or revenue generation. The circularity of that argument is worth stating: a programme given less support attracts fewer participants and generates less revenue, which is then cited as justification for the support level.
Where the circle has been broken deliberately — through legal requirement, sustained investment, or both — participation and revenue have generally responded.
The coaching supply problem
Coaching quality is one of the strongest predictors of retention in youth sport, and coaching is unevenly distributed.
Girls' teams at community level are more likely to be coached by volunteers with less formal qualification, and coach turnover is higher. Paid coaching positions, where they exist, are concentrated in boys' and men's programmes.
The pipeline problem is self-reinforcing here too. Coaches are drawn disproportionately from former players; fewer women play on to the age at which people become coaches; fewer women coach; girls' teams are less likely to have a coach who has been in their position.
Studies of coaching workforce composition find women substantially underrepresented, including in coaching women's teams, and the proportion falls as the level rises.
Why the boring version matters more
Elite-level inequalities affect a very small number of people directly, and they matter mainly through visibility — what a fourteen-year-old sees on television affects what she believes is available.
Facility inequalities affect everyone who plays, every week, and they operate as a direct filter on participation. A girl who cannot get to a nine o'clock session is not making a choice about sport; she is being excluded by a timetable.
The evidence on what raises participation is fairly consistent: convenient scheduling, adequate facilities, low cost, competent coaching and a recreational option. None of these is a campaign. All of them are line items.
What an audit looks like
The useful thing about facility inequality is that it is measurable, and the measurement is not difficult.
Count the hours. Which teams have which slots, on which surfaces, with what lighting, across a season. Compare per participant.
Compare the budgets. Travel, kit, coaching hours, medical cover, equipment replacement.
Look at the changing facilities and ask whether an adolescent would use them willingly.
Institutions that have conducted this exercise honestly generally find larger disparities than they expected, because the allocations were inherited rather than chosen and nobody had added them up.
That is the most encouraging feature of this particular inequality. It is rarely defended once it is quantified — mostly because almost nobody decided it, and so almost nobody is committed to it.