Gender Roles in Eventing

Back when I didn't worry about what I could or couldn't do, and was just happy to be riding!

While I’ve always thought that one of the really neat things about eventing is that men and women compete together, I’ve always wondered why there is a gender gap: there are so many more women than men at the lower levels of eventing, but roughly equal numbers at the upper levels. This means that a higher percentage of the men who start off eventing will make it to the upper levels compared to the women who start off eventing. This is not too dissimilar from the life sciences today, where there are a lot of women in PhD programs, but the upper levels at most companies and universities have a much higher percentage of men, and women get paid less than men.

In the scientific workplace, at least, there are clearly factors in both the culture and the way that women tend to behave that prevent women from doing as well as men. However, I’m not sure that the culture plays a huge role in eventing. We’re a pretty accepting bunch, and I haven’t seen any evidence that women are held to a higher standard than men in the eventing world, or that eventing is an ‘old boys club’ the way that many scientific fields are.

It seems, then, that the way that women tend to behave must be creating the gender gap in eventing. This is not to say, of course, that these behaviors are the fault of the women who are doing them, either in eventing or in the workplace. Obviously eventing is a dangerous sport, is perhaps getting even more so in recent years, and takes a certain amount of guts. I know plenty of women who don’t want to compete above the level they are at because they think it’s scary. I’m not interested in pushing anyone beyond what they really want to do, but how much of these women’s fear is because they are lacking confidence in their ability to move up?

I think that confidence plays a big role in a lot of issues for women. Sometimes, it just makes it hard for us to push for what we want, whether it’s calling to follow up on a job interview or jumping a scary fence that we are ready for. Negotiating my salary for my job was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, and I wasn’t very confident about it, but I felt like I had to do it because part of the reason for the gender gap in salaries is that women don’t ask as often as men. I know that I often have to pump myself up in order to ask for tough things like that. Maybe we also don’t ‘ask’ as often as men do in eventing, or we take longer doing it because we have to pump ourselves up first.

It also seems like women tend to feel like they suck pretty often riding, and I think that confidence plays a big role in that, too. Since Tiger and I have been making progress, I haven’t been feeling like I suck at riding in the last few weeks, but I certainly felt that way a lot over the spring, and I’m sure I will get back there – it’s so easy with riding, in part because we can always do more to be better. A friend of mine started feeling like she sucked the other day when another friend gave her some tips on how to get her horse more over his back. Being an outsider, I can tell you without a doubt that this first friend has improved tremendously in her dressage in the last year and the difference is quite noticeable in both of her horses. In fact, I envy her position because it is so much stronger and more upright than mine at the moment! However, when she was told that she needed to do more to get her young horse really going correctly, she felt like she sucks and she hasn’t done anything right. I think she lacked the confidence to say to herself ‘yes, I still have to improve. Don’t we always? But what I have been doing has helped me progress already.’ In contrast to this female friend, a male rider that I know is a great rider and a really phenomenal competitor, and I think that this is largely because of his confidence, and the way that he doesn’t let himself feel like he sucks. I know that he is constantly working to improve his horses, but he never gets off and says ‘that sucked;’ instead he almost always says something along the lines of ‘it was beautiful.’ The thing about feeling like you suck is that it’s easy to get stuck there, and it then inhibits your progress, because you spend time being down on yourself about sucking.

So what can we as women do to improve our collective confidence both in riding and in other situations, and hopefully lessen the gender gap? I’m not really sure, but I think being aware of it is a start. Hopefully, being aware of it will help us be less down on ourselves when things don’t go perfectly and will help us push ourselves with less ramp-up time to do small things like jumping that scary fence that we know we are ready for. I also think that whether it’s for riding or at work, having a trainer or mentor who believes in you makes a big difference. I recently had a lesson with my new trainer and worked the hardest I have worked in a jump lesson since I brought Tiger here, but I didn’t walk away feeling like I sucked. There’s definitely something to be said for improving your confidence by riding with someone who is positive so that you feel like they believe in you, but still pushes you to improve constantly.

However you do it, build your confidence and let it help you do what you want and lessen gender gaps in the process!

Practice Makes Progress

One of my tae kwon do instructors when I was younger used to love the phrase ‘practice makes progress’ and thought that ‘practice makes perfect’ is a lie because we would always have something more to work toward. Much to Tiger’s dismay, and aside from a recent vacation while I went to Michigan, we have been practicing, and we have been making progress. A friend videoed a ride we had before my vacation, and you can see the improvement compared to our dressage test at Coconino!

Tiger is more consistently through his topline, especially in the trot, and this has the effect that his hind end can actually come up under him more and isn’t so disjointed.

However, we still need to keep practicing and keep pushing to make progress. I recently realized that even though riding definitely exemplifies this ‘practice makes progress’ concept and I generally find it easy to be eternally hard on my riding, I also have never treated my riding as I have been coached to treat other sports. I focus on concepts, but I don’t usually force Tiger and I to do an exact movement over and over and over until we make progress with it. This seems particularly important for basic movements like trot-canter transitions. These are like the horsey equivalent of the 100 push-ups we used to do in conditioning class for tae kwon do, which made me stronger and more ready to do the other activities required of me. So, ever since a friend recently helped Tiger and I with our flatwork and said we should do trot-canter transitions until we drop dead, we’ve been doing the horsey equivalent of 100 push-ups: 3 sets of 10 trot-canter transitions each direction. I supposed I should not be surprised that this idea has been extremely helpful, since dressage is supposed to be strength training like weight lifting. So often we practice dressage movements to build strength in a horse, yet we seem to expect to build that strength and thus progress by practicing a movement only a few times per ride. It turns out that (at least with Tiger) I can make a lot more progress by practicing the movement more! (Duh, right?)

With all of this progress, Tiger has gone through a gradual emotional progression related to dressage. Tiger’s emotional progressions are one of the funniest things about this horse, because you can watch them on his face. With newer and harder work, he goes from defiant to begrudgingly accepting to happy to be doing it. I am happy to say that with this dressage boot camp we are finally reaching that ‘happy to be doing it’ phase! Let’s just hope he keeps that attitude for our upcoming shows!

As a side note, and just because it’s entertaining, here’s an example of Tiger’s emotional progression after he was naughty and reared on a trail ride:

(Left) "I was bad; I'm not sure I'm gonna get a carrot." (Middle) "What a *****! She's really not going to give me a carrot!" (Right) "Ooo, maybe I'll get a carrot after all!"

Inadvertent Challenges

"Really? We have to do dressage AGAIN? FML."

Anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely do not like to be told that I’m not capable of something, and this only tends to make me work harder. At our most recent event, Tiger and I got a 41 in dressage and I was upset that our score was worse than our previous 36 since I felt that our dressage had improved significantly. I’ve been aiming to improve towards a score in the low 30s, but when I told this to my trainer she said that she thought I would never score better than a 35 with Tiger. Naturally, I took that as a challenge, and, much to Tiger's dismay, he was destined for a dressage boot camp.

The thing about my dressage with Tiger is that although progress has been slow, we have made steady improvements since he came to me. In spite of the fact that several people have mentioned wanting to see me on a ‘more cooperative’ horse, I’m just not ready to give up on him until I stop seeing improvement. On top of that, I’m a big believer in waiting a year to seriously evaluate a rider’s partnership with a new horse because it just takes time to get to know each other. I think this inadvertent challenge may have been just the kick in the pants we needed to make some more rapid progress and improve our partnership in the dressage.

I have to confess that I never wrote down my small goals after my last post, but I did think about them a lot; there are a lot of little things to fix in Tiger’s and my tests. However, as I started thinking about how to fix these things, I realized that there was a fundamental step that we had basically tried to skip over in our approach so far with Tiger’s dressage. We were very focused on trying to lift his back and keep him straight, but had never really made him accept the contact, and so it was an impossible task. Sometimes he was ‘round,’ but he was still very heavy in my hand and generally just slightly above the vertical. If I think about the training triangle that was drilled into me when I was younger, I feel stupid for overlooking this basic concept. But it wasn’t until I took on this challenge and started thinking independently about our dressage that I realized this.

I think that since I’ve started my ‘real job’ and can actually afford some lessons now, I’ve been so excited about taking lessons that I’ve devalued my own experience and knowledge base. In grad school, I rarely had lessons, in part because I didn’t think the expense was worth it if I was still making progress and wasn’t at the edge of my knowledge with a given horse. I’m not advocating not taking any lessons in a situation like my current one. There’s no way I would fix my positional issues without someone reminding me to ‘straighten your left wrist’ and ‘keep your shoulders back’ every few minutes. However, I do think that there’s something to be said for my grad school approach. There is a lot of my knowledge that I haven’t yet taken advantage of with Tiger, and I should use that wonderful resource I have! The occasional lesson can help remind me of past epiphanies and exercises to fix certain problems, but I should also be thinking independently about how to improve my riding and spending a fair bit of time schooling on my own.

We’re about 2 weeks into our dressage boot camp and still have about 6 weeks until our next event. Hopefully we can live up to the inadvertent challenge and break 35! Either way, though, I’ve learned to be grateful for the knowledge I have retained and to use this to my fullest advantage.

Getting Back Into It

After 9 years off of regular competition, I’m getting back into it. In college, I evented through Prelim on the best horse I’ve ever known, but when my parents said they couldn’t pay for him any more I was forced to sell him. After college I moved to California for graduate school, and although I rode some great horses and taught and even worked at a big eventing barn, I didn’t compete seriously or regularly, didn’t have much instruction myself, and then at the end I took a year off of riding and over two years off of jumping. Now, with a ‘real job’ and an event horse (Tiger) that I’ve borrowed from some friends who’ve moved out of the country, I’m trying to compete again. Getting back into it after a break has been frustrating, but there’s just something about riding and eventing that is a life-long commitment and that I just don’t want to give up. 

Getting back into eventing has been frustrating for so many reasons: I’ve lost my Pony Club approved position both on the flat and over fences; I know that I should be doing things like keeping my right hip back through a turn and even WHY I should be doing them but I have to hear it over and over again because I can’t seem to actually do them with my aforementioned loss of correct position; Tiger hates dressage, is very long-backed anyway, and, worse, came to me out of shape and not having really been as through as he is capable of in several years; and finally I’ve had some stupid mistakes at the 3 events we’ve done so far, including missing a fence on XC at Galway and having two stops into the water (with no jump!) at Coconino because I was exhausted and too out of shape for XC at 7,000 feet, and Tiger decided he’d rather run out toward the barn than help me out.

All of that frustration keeps leading me to ask myself why I am spending a good fraction of my ‘real job’ income and PTO putting myself through all of these emotional ups and downs. I volunteered to take Tiger when my friends moved out of the country because I’d had a lot of changes in my life in a very short period and knew that the stability that horses provide would be beneficial. But the emotional ups and downs that come with competing or even just working towards a riding goal sometimes feel like they negate this stability. Part of what I really enjoy about riding, though, is having ‘projects’ and goals to work towards; I don’t think I would be happy just trail riding every day. There are also my bigger picture motivations: even though I have a ‘real job,’ I still really love teaching and training, and would ultimately like it to be a part of my career. Also, I know that even though Tiger hates dressage and we may not do very well, getting my position back and getting back into competing at the lower levels with him will help me prepare for my next horse, who will almost certainly be young.

It’s been hard to keep all of these motivations in mind and to take advantage of the stability that horses can provide, though, through the ups and downs of competing, my frustrations with my own riding, and the all-too-familiar barn drama. I still want to ride, but I’m also not enjoying every day at the barn or every lesson. I understand that to be a good competitor and athlete you need to push on through the hard parts. However, I also think that at this stage, where I am essentially riding just for fun and am sort of temporarily ‘stuck’ at the lower levels and am not even that competitive because of the limitations of my current horse and my current self, I need to find ways to enjoy almost every day at the barn.

To make sure I am enjoying every day, I’m going to try several things. First, I’m going to write down and define much smaller goals and ‘projects’ both for Tiger and for my own position. Second, I’m going to (gasp!) do more things outside of riding. I’ve been seriously neglecting the rest of my life since I started riding again and started my ‘real job’ all at the same time, in part because I’ve taken every opportunity I can to ride extra horses. Although I love this extra riding, I haven’t had much time for the other exercise that I usually do in my free time, which improves my riding in its own way and is fun! Third, I’m going to do fun things with Tiger that aren’t competition oriented, like long trail rides in cool places, riding on the beach, and hopefully foxhunting. Finally, I’m going to try to remember something that a new friend told me recently- that her horse makes her laugh every day. Tiger is a great character and does make me laugh a lot, and I think keeping the funny things he does in mind is important. I hope that if I do these things I will be able to both enjoy every day of my riding and keep working toward my bigger motivations for riding.