Gender and skateboarding: What can skateboarders learn from archaeologists?
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 19/04/2017

While gender equality in academia has not yet been fully achieved, most universities and academic departments are striving towards this goal. Many archaeology departments find that they have a relatively even gender-balance at undergraduate level, gradually becoming more male-dominated from masters to professorial level. There is clearly still work to be done but academia in general, and archaeology specifically, have made great inroads into equality. By contrast skateboarding in the UK remains heavily male dominated. The experience of walking into a skatepark as a female can be very intimidating, and especially off-putting to beginners; while street skating often culminates in altercations with security or police. Increasingly pay-in skateparks are introducing female-only sessions in an effort to encourage more women to enter skateparks, but in some cases these can cause resentment from male skatepark users, and also discourage women from attending ‘normal’ (male-dominated) sessions, unintentionally enforcing segregation not only within the session, but beyond. Here I will discuss what can be done to break-down the gender barrier and get more women skateboarding alongside men. We will look to the history of women in archaeology and academia, to see how equality can be achieved and whether skateboarding can learn anything from archaeology. 

Christina Collins, University of Exeter