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!"