Announcement of the Gender Equality Commission from EBF

On the proposal of the EBF President Mr. Addie Ophelders, the EBF Presidium in October 2021 decided to establish the Gender Equality Commission (GEC).

The task of the GEC is to create a strategy on how to increase the number of women in bowling’s management, coaching and participation structures.

The GEC wants to include 1-2 men as members as well, since gender equality concerns all people in bowling and different genders need to work in unity to change the current unequal conditions for women. The men will initially be invited as observers to the GEC.

GEC has asked EBF President to send a questionnaire  to all member federations to collect detailed statistics about number of women working on managerial positions within national federations to evaluate the current status of women’s involvement.

Two ideas were already discussed:

1. To start drafting the policy, which would enable the electability of women to EBF and national federation management boards,we also must find the means and develop a sustainable action plan on how to empower women to run for executive positions. Points a) and b) are to support this idea:
   1. EU Gender Equality in Sport Recommendations and Action Plan (2022) suggests Quota provisions concerning women’s representation in decision making positions and will be published soon.
   2. we will try to organise a half an hour lecture about the GEC tasks and focuses – the goal is to find a representative from one international sport organisation for the next meeting which will be held on June 16, 2022.

As our beloved sport and industry are hit strongly by the pandemic, the ETBF Presidium and Educational committee decided to use this as an opportunity to enhance their educational programs.

The ETBF Academy Development Team will work on our existing coaching programs’ content and structure and will evaluate the options to make it more accessible via online channels. Besides improving our content for Coaching, Lane Maintenance and Ball Drilling programs, our team will work on creating additional online clinics for more advanced and focused content.

An ETBF Level IV Coaching Program will be the core part of our 2021 Development Project, which will provide a very important addition to our Coaching Programs. ETBF Senior Instructor Juha Maja will lead the Level IV Program which is planned to be released in 2022.

Ulf Hämnäs (Norway), Robert Anderson (Sweden), Mark Heathorn (England) and Calvin Murray (Scotland) will join our Development Team with our Educational Team members (Onder Gurkan, Marios Nicolaides, Piritta Maja, Costas Mitsingas and Gediz Ege). Our team will also communicate and work with various coaches and experts during this process.

We are very excited to start creating new contents and updating our programs for our federations.

Best regards with our hopes to come back to normal days …

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ETBF – European Tenpin Bowling Federation is the governing body of Tenpin Bowling Federations in European zone. ETBF ACADEMY is European Tenpin Bowling Federation’s education platform that provides Coaching and Technical programs for Federations.