From the kitchen table of sport to the boardroom of skiing: Sport Canada’s equal opportunity incentives and the Women’s Committee of Cross Country Canada, 1980–2000

This article traces the Women's Committee of Cross Country Canada and its work, spurred by public policy incentives promoting equal opportunity for women in sport. The Committee – its purpose, programs and leaders – was an axis of social change in cross country skiing. Sport Canada offered seed funding to form women's committees in national sport organizations during the 1980s, leveraging volunteers to push sport and institutions toward gender equality. Based on archival and oral history sources, the authors reveal how the Women's Committee initiated affirmative action to enable women in skiing while constrained by implicit gender norms and policy regimes. Framed by federal policy initiatives and dominant sport structures, the Women's Committee was a gendered space that generated dialogue, capacity and administrative groundwork within Cross Country Canada to support and expand recreational and elite sport development for women and Para-skiers, while resisting an uneven world of masculinist hegemony in sport.