Mary Harvey: Why sport can’t ignore human rights

Mary Harvey: Why sport can’t ignore human rights

Mary Harvey (-1h -1m -3s):

I had it from the age of 12 when I started playing. So I wasn't aware if it was available below, that probably was now, but I, I was always on girls' teams. When I first started.

 Sue Anstiss (12s):

Where did you grow up?

 Mary Harvey (14s):

I grew up in a little town outside of Palo Alto, which is, of course now become, you know, where all venture capital comes from in the Silicon Valley. But back then it was very different. It was very much research, aerospace and defence, Stanfords, you know, Slack, different research institutions. So very brainy, you know, part of the world, but it wasn't about the Silicon Valley, but that's where I grew up actually a little town called Los Altos Hills is where I'm from.

 Sue Anstiss (44s):

And what was it like playing soccer then for a young girl? When you start at 12, you say in the seventies, what was it like playing soccer at the time?

 Mary Harvey (52s):

I mean, for me, I went to a very small private school and there weren't, the classes sizes were small and you sort of every year you moved up with the same kids. So, you know, your social circle, wasn't going to be defined by people who were in your class. So for me, it was, I got a chance to meet kids, you know, outside of my school, which was great. And I think it's where I really started to discover that I had real physical literacy. I was good at sports. You know, I, I struggled in other areas, you know, I was very, near-sighted wore glasses and some other things, but I was coordinated. I was athletic.

 Mary Harvey (1m 32s):

I felt better. So I think maybe it was more starting to understand that. And really it was my first opportunity to be in team sports and understand that you're part of something that's bigger than you and being a middle kid, it's a bit of a setup. So you're sort of programmed that way to sort of how's everyone doing it, but yeah, it was wonderful.

 Sue Anstiss (2m 1s):

And was soccer seen as more of a girl sport than a boy’s sport? I guess that's a perception that we have from the UK. Is the case? Was that the case when you were growing up?

 Mary Harvey (2m 11s):

Well, no. I mean, it was just a whole different world back then, whole different world. I mean, we hadn't hosted World Cup '94. I mean, when I started playing, there was no women's international football, FIFA hadn't even figured out that it was going to have a women's world cup. I mean, there wasn't even a national team. Maybe they were playing, 76 I started playing. I mean, that's definitely ages me, but Wikipedia, you can find out how old I am its probably not a shock. You know? So none of this was really anything that we, I mean, we couldn't imagine, you know, what, 20 years later would look like I'd be playing in the Olympics, football, women's football be in the, in the Olympics.

 Mary Harvey (2m 56s):

I mean, I mean, it's just, you just never could have imagined it back then.

 Sue Anstiss (3m 0s):

And the podcast is a fairly British audience. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about Title IX because not, everybody's kind of really aware of that. So a little background will be fantastic.

 Mary Harvey (3m 11s):

Sure. So, and I'm, I'm definitely not the expert. It's funny. I think you may have had Moya Dodd on.

 Sue Anstiss (3m 18s):

I did. Yes.

 Mary Harvey (3m 19s):

So Moya Dodd, she and I were in Washington DC for some event and we had a day free or half a day free and she wanted to go to the national archives, all the places that really don't want to go to Erin space. No, I want to go to national archives. Okay. We go to the national archives and she wanted to see Title IX. And I remember when we, and it was this one wall where it had, it was dedicated to women and it was the Equal Rights Amendment and it was Title IX. It was the same session of Congress that passed both. I mean, it was like the 55th Congress of the US like was bad ass. I mean, they just did it. Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX.

 Mary Harvey (4m 1s):

I mean, they, bam. They just got it done. I forget which congresses Nancy Hogg, would definitely know. But Title IX is basically this, this concept that if there's public funding, that there'd be equality of opportunity. And that was interpreted in a variety of ways. And it was interpreted when it came to funding of athletics programs and it was never intended that it would cover that. And yet it did. So what it meant was is that girls became a, started to have access to funding for sports programs and, you know, Nancy, you know, and Donna De Varona. Love Donna De Varona. If you want to talk about Title IX, you absolutely have to talk to Donna De Varona.

 Mary Harvey (4m 44s):

Excellent. I mean, her fingerprints are all over it. I mean, literally I'm not saying kind of, I mean, literally, and then Nancy picked up the baton after her and Donna will tell you that she was, I think talking to the swimmers in the 1984 Olympic team and she was talking to them and Nancy Hogg said was in the room. Nancy Hogg she said, you all are about to become famous. The question I want to ask you is what are you going to do with it? And she looked at the women and she said, I think Donna may say I story wrong, but she said, what are you going to do with it? She goes, I want it to be about Title IX.

 Mary Harvey (5m 25s):

Nancy goes on to get a law degree at Georgetown and has dedicated her life among other things to defence of Title IX. So Title IX is basically the concept that women, it, it, it guarantees resourcing for women and women's sports among other things, but also for educational institutions and men passed it, a largely male Congress passed it. And it was amazing. It was, has been transformative for opportunities that women and girls have in the United States without question.

 Sue Anstiss (5m 56s):

And did it impact your own experience, do you feel?

 Mary Harvey (6m 2s):

Yang? Yes and no. As they say in German. No in the sense that I wasn't a direct recipient of timeline funds, I actually had an anti scholarship to, which is where I was paying funds. I was right at the very beginning because I'm a little bit older than the Title IX generation, at least for my sport. I think in other sports, it was implemented earlier. My sport was just getting traction. So during the course of my time at the University of California, Berkeley, which is where I went to university, got my colours on today, during the course of my four years there playing, we saw money come in that then funded players.

 Mary Harvey (6m 48s):

But they, they always funded the younger players because we wanted to attract them. Right. So yes and no, I benefited for sure. But what's happened afterwards has been extraordinary.

 Sue Anstiss (7m 0s):

So good to hear, isn't it. Did you ever imagine, as you were growing up that there was an opportunity or there would be to have a career in soccer at all?

 Mary Harvey (7m 10s):

As a professional football player? Yeah, absolutely not. I mean, there wasn't anybody. I mean, again, there's no women's world cup. There's no Olympic games. There's no women's national team. The women's national team got established in 1985 in the US. Digital accessibility of information wasn't what it is today. Right. It wasn't like I could see the German women's national team playing in 1989 in the European championships. Actually I did because I was living in Germany at the time. But prior to that, you wouldn't know that. Right. So, no, it wasn't. I mean, you were done playing essentially after college. Yeah. College ended, which was your league that you played in and at the age of 21 you're done now, you know, as a professional player, now you're just starting to find out how good you are when you hit 21,

 Sue Anstiss (7m 60s):

And you did go on to play in the national team. That wasn't an ambition as a, as a younger player. And obviously we could talk for hours about your incredible playing career., You were in the team that won both the World Cup and then a home Olympics too. What would be some of your most powerful memories from your career? If you had to cite a couple.

 Mary Harvey (8m 21s):

You know, you get older and you have a chance to digest it through a different lens, right. And you sort of over time, appreciate more and more what you've learned. I would just say indelible, examples of leadership that I saw. I mean, it's the pursuit of performance and you know, it's interesting, you know, I talked to teammates now and we're talking to each other as adults, we're adults back then, but more mature adults with life behind us, right? 20 years, parenthood, all these things behind us. And we're now looking our shared experience of what we learned back then through a different lens.

 Mary Harvey (9m 0s):

And I've had a chat with some teammates, including some who are now also in leadership positions in sport. And we're talking about diversity and inclusion, for example. And if you've come out of an environment where you've been a team sport, elite athlete, and you're trying to understand why diversity and inclusion isn't inside sports bodies, it literally is baffling because if you're a performance athlete, the only thing that matters in anything when you're choosing people, is, is this the best team that's going to drive performance? And it doesn't matter what the team looks like.

 Mary Harvey (9m 42s):

It doesn't matter where you come from. It doesn't matter. Literally, can you help the team perform? And if you can, that is what matters. That's the only thing that matters. And so when you're looking at trying to unpick, why things like there aren't enough women in senior management positions, there aren't people from different backgrounds in senior positions in sport. And yet there is ample evidence that teams that are diverse for a variety of reasons perform better. That evidence is, is not in dispute. I mean, it's clear. Why would you not want that?

 Mary Harvey (10m 23s):

Why would you not want to have a team that was performing at such a high level? If you talk to people like me and like, you know, others, it's like we can't wrap our head around why we would do that. You know, it's. So I think about the things that I got on a daily basis. I mean, there's certainly moments that are incredible from the '91 World Cup to, you know, the Olympic games, incredible moments, but I'd say the day-to-day things that I got from just interacting with extraordinary human beings. I mean, you can't put a price on that.

 Sue Anstiss (10m 58s):

The US women's soccer team today are renowned for being real trailblazers, especially in the area of equal pay. Has this always been the case for the national team?

 Mary Harvey (11m 9s):

You know, I get asked that question quite a bit and well, you know, and we were, I mean, I was part of the team back in, you know, I joined the team in '89 and there had been a team that had been in place since '85. But in the years of like '89, '90, '91 '92, it was the first world cup. It was. So I don't want to take anything away from those who came before us, but there was definitely, we were kind of laying down the culture, I think at that point of what we were about. And we, there are a variety of things that you could say about what was true then that you can still say is true now.

 Mary Harvey (11m 50s):

Even though the team has gone through metamorphosis of, you know, the whole thing has metamorphosised since then, but somethings are still true today. And one of them is how do we make it better for those who come after us? Right? I mean, nobody wants to go through what we went through. So how do we make it better? It's a bit like being a parent, right? How do I make sure that those, the kids that come after us don't have to have the same, they're going to have their own set of issues, but not the same issues that we had. They shouldn't be fighting about maternity leave. They shouldn't be fighting about childcare and nannies and things like this. I mean, if you're breastfeeding, it is not an option, I mean, come on, let's just have a real discussion about this.

 Mary Harvey (12m 37s):

We would have loved to have had a discussion about equal pay, but I mean, it had to evolve. We had to get maternity leave done. We had to get, you know, basic things dealt with so that the next generation wouldn't have to. And that's, what's been consistent, I think, is this idea of what are we leaving for the others to pick up?

 Sue Anstiss (12m 56s):

And obviously this year, judge threw out the claim for equal pay, can you see a day soon when this will be achieved?

 Mary Harvey (13m 7s):

God, I hope so. You know, and it's not, you know people talk about how you determine what's equal pay. And, and I come back to, if you chronically under, if you look at it very narrowly and say, well, money that comes in is directly related to X. So therefore Y is appropriate as compensation. If you've chronically under-invested for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, the men have been, you know, invested. there's been investment in the men's game for decades, and you're just starting to invest in the women's game.

 Mary Harvey (13m 47s):

And then you take a snapshot and say, well, based on these numbers, that's what you, you should earn. It's not a fair argument if you've been chronically under investing or over investing in, in one versus the other. So I think some of the comparisons are not equal. I don't think you can make them. I think a better comparison is if you've had equal investment and one is earning more than the other, then you can have a discussion perhaps about that. But that's not the case here.

 Sue Anstiss (14m 17s):

Yup. Yup. And if I look at the makeup of the team right now, it perhaps doesn't look as diverse as it might. Is that fair, do you think?

 Mary Harvey (14m 27s):

Well,

Sue Anstiss (14m 28s):

In terms of race and ethnicity within the U S team and how that relates to the rest of the population.

 Mary Harvey (14m 35s):

You think there is not sufficient diversity.

 Sue Anstiss (14m 39s):

It does, but maybe that's an outsider looking at it as it is at the moment. Do you feel there is?

 Mary Harvey (14m 47s):

I mean, I'm sure I'm sure it can always be more diverse. And I think certainly, I mean, but, but let's talk about it. Let's talk about the player pool, which, which leads into, you know, the national team and the sport in the United States, men and women, which is not the way it is in the rest of the world. It's very much an upper-middle-class type sport, which is probably what you're getting at. So yes, and that's, that's a known issue. And if you think about it, the United States is a country of people who have chosen to come and live there from our inception, right? We're a former colony and, and people have chosen from different countries to come to the United States and make it their home.

 Mary Harvey (15m 32s):

So we have all of these backgrounds and from different parts of the world that are in the United States. And also we have different socioeconomic, as every country does, levels. And in every other part of the world, football is the game that is accessible to everyone. But in the US, it has become something that is accessible to people who have the money to participate. And that's going to be a natural funnel. If that is then what leads into your elite elite programs. So is the women's national team or any, or the men's national team or others as diverse they could be no for that very reason, because it's not reflective of the entire population that probably would want to participate if they could.

Sue Anstiss (16m 22s):

Moving on, through your career, you have some big roles in management consultancies, and then you went to work for FIFA in 2003, I believe. What was your, your role there?

Mary Harvey (16m 33s):

So I went to work for FIFA in 2003 as its Director of development. And at the time there wasn't, the structure was different. So you had director levels sat directly below the general secretary. So the secretary general, general secretary, what have you and the general secretary report into the president? So I was, I reported to the general secretary. So the equivalent of Fatma Samoura today, a man named is Linsi. He's the one that hired me. And when I came on board, I was one of very few Americans who had held that position. And I was first woman.

Sue Anstiss (17m 12s):

What are you most proud of from your time in that role, as you look back now?

Mary Harvey (17m 17s):

That I, I did some things personally, that cause you're going to win some, you're going to lose a lot of battles. So it's about winning the war. You're going to lose some battles, but you want to win the war. And I would say, I feel very good about my fingerprints being on some things that mattered. I remember the very first time when we had year-end reviews and I saw what everybody was making, and I immediately address some gender pay gaps like that. I mean, there were no gender pay gaps in the development division for people while I was there, period, full stop.

Mary Harvey (17m 58s):

I instituted salary bands and it was, you know, blind to things that had nothing to do with anything other than performance and, and level of responsibility. So I feel good about that, that I did right away. I put in some things that were dismantled after I left that I felt good about, so I instituted financial transparency into development money that was going out the door to FIFA. So I put in place an independent audit requirement. I put in place a quota for women's football was already in place, but my job was to enforce it. And I had zero sense of humour.

Mary Harvey (18m 39s):

And I could find any number of ways that people would try to use to justify that money was spent on women's football and it wasn't being spent on women's football. So, you know, after years of that, people just said, right, we're just going to put in programming for women's football. Cause they knew that you just stopped with the games and just do it because we, you know, and I would deduct money. I'd just say, you know what, if you don't spend it on women's football, you're getting less next year and you still have the same amount you have to spend on women's football. So just, just do it, just do the right thing, stop trying to, you know, get around it. It's not going to work, you know, the establishment of the under 17 women's world cup. I saw an opportunity there and shamelessly, you know, pandered to their sense of, you know, equality and just said, listen, you're about to expand the men's world cup to 24 teams and you don't have one for the women's world cup, establish it.

Mary Harvey (19m 31s):

Funding, you know, development of women's referee the women's referee program. I mean, those are just the things that have to do with women's football, but I felt very good about those things.

Sue Anstiss (19m 40s):

And how did your time there impact your views on the power of sport to influence wider society? Do you think?

Mary Harvey (19m 47s):

Hmm, that's a good question. I mean, you became because of the nature of it, I mean, we call it the power of football because just the size and scope of the sport it's is global. If you think about it besides humanity and perhaps gender, right? So that's 50% of the population. What's the next thing that people have in common. It might be the sport of football, if you think about it, that people share somehow as a fan, as, as a child, as an adult, whatever, it's this, this, this thing that is this universal language. And I think it was profound respect for that.

Mary Harvey (20m 30s):

And also a sense of how I fit into it, both as a woman, as a, an American, you know, because everybody has their own way of relating to it. But I think those things made the biggest impact.

Sue Anstiss (20m 45s):

And then in 2009, you went back to the US to be the CEO of the new women's professional soccer league, the WPS, what was happening in the women's game at the time in the U S when you returned?

Mary Harvey (20m 57s):

Then after the failure of the first league WSA, and it had been a number of years, and it was a point where there'd been business plan. There had been investors and owners set up and we had wind at our back, which was, you know, a business plan that didn't look at a single entity. It looked at an ownership model. It was after a prolonged period of not having a women's league in the US after WSA. So WSA 2003, it was then 2009. Wow. Right. So that's, that's, that's quite a bit of time as opposed to WPS shuttered in 2011.

Mary Harvey (21m 38s):

And it almost immediately you saw the NWSL show up and WPS was important for a lot of reasons. And there were there elements of, you know, things about it that were systemic, that didn't work. But also it, it was that combined with the great recession that, that hit, like, I mean, I think the, the month we kicked off the Dow Jones industrial average was a 6,500. I mean, it was just, just the worst possible economic and no new deal money was coming in. None, nobody was doing new deals, so it's just hard, but we learned on, and I do believe it played a big role in the NWSL.

Sue Anstiss (22m 18s):

Excellent. That was going to be my next question. That's all good. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Center for Sport and Human Rights and how you came to take the role that you have now?

Mary Harvey (22m 29s):

Sure. So I'm the CEO for the Center for Sport and Human Rights. And before I took this job, I was running my own consultancy called Ripple Effect. And the U S was once again, bidding to host the world cup this time with Canada and Mexico, the world cup would be 48 teams first time. And the, and I want it in because I mean, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity and I believed in United As One, I fundamentally believed in it. But one thing I'll get to how this brought me to the center was, you know, I want it to be on the sustainability team because I've always cared about it. And I bid, I want it to be a part of the, the environmental protection team, because I, you know, also that's a big part of me.

Mary Harvey (23m 15s):

And what I believe in is environmental responsibility. And they said, well, we'd love you to do that. But we have someone who can do that. The part that we don't know that nobody knows it's this new human rights piece, the human rights is now going to be, they're going to be all these human rights requirements and nobody knows it. And so they asked me to do that. And so they landed on my desk on October 16th, 2017, and nobody knew them. I, and I read them and I didn't understand them.

Sue Anstiss (23m 45s):

As part the the bid process?

Mary Harvey (23m 47s):

As part of the bid process, right. so I'm in New York and, you know, part of the bid team and these human rights, detailed requirements come flying over the internet. Then they land on my desk and I pick them up. And I've absolutely no idea what they're talking about. And I remember reaching out to a woman named Minkey Worden, the human rights watch. And I said, Minky, you know, like, I don't understand this. She goes, you're perfect. Because once you learn it, you're going to explain it, to the world of sport who also doesn't understand it because you speak their language and we need somebody who has a foot in both worlds. She was absolutely right. So that led me to this powerful experience of what's possible, when you have build this bridge between the values of what sport wants to achieve.

Mary Harvey (24m 34s):

So all the powerful things that I personally got from sport, it was in the presence of this incredible opportunity, but also bad things didn't happen to me. Right? So that's possible, but that's not the case for many, many men and women. I'll never forget being at the council on foreign relations in New York and being asked the question, what has sport's given me. And I talk about all the things, some of the things I talked to you about, and afterwards, a woman came up to me who was a little bit emotional. And she said, that was beautiful. What you said, it really moved me. And then she said, but I'm sad because everything that you just said, sport gave you, it took from me.

Mary Harvey (25m 17s):

And one of these women, she was one of the Larry Nassar survivors. Wow. Right. And I've never forgotten that. And I will never forget that. And that's who we work for at the Center for Sport and Human Rights. So it's this idea that for sport to be what we hold it to be and what it can deliver, it's in the presence of safeguards to ensure that, that it does that. And that makes sure that when you put on a mega sporting event, that at a minimum, there's no harm being done. And unfortunately we have examples of where harm has happened. People die building stadiums. That shouldn't be the case. Those are preventable deaths, journalists are threatened or not able to report freely neighborhoods can be bulldozed to make way for infrastructure for, for an event, there's pollution.

Mary Harvey (26m 5s):

There's all sorts of things that can happen. And what the center does is we say, okay, these are known issues. How can we work with sports bodies to help them understand how they can build protections in to prevent these harms from happening? And there's two sort of ways we do that. One is through what we know about what's happened in the past with mega sporting events, like the world cup, the Olympics, what have you, all the different ways where we've seen things happen in the past, beyond preventing those, let's talk to the people who have been impacted from those hear, from then directly, affected groups, we call them and say, how can we their voice into how we do things going forward?

Mary Harvey (26m 47s):

Very, very powerful. So part of it is our work is mega sporting events. And the other part of our work is day-to-day sport. And that gets into things like safeguarding. And how do you ensure that I just, we just did a webinar this morning on athlete abuse. What have we learned about what happened in Afghanistan? What happened in what's happening in Haiti? What's happened in Japan to athletes, what's happened in gymnastics? What can we take from that, those horrible examples and say, what are we learning about what's key to preventing this. And what's key to enabling victims to feel safe, enough to report.

Mary Harvey (27m 27s):

And so all these things are part of what we call the work around day to day sport and helping sport bodies understand how can we make commitments to human rights and put it in place so that we know that if that ever happens, God forbid we have an approach to address it that is centered on the victim and what he or she needs as opposed to protecting the institution. Right. That's a paradigm shift that's needed. And those are some of the sorts of things that we do at the center. I mean, lots of other things, but at a core that's, those are the big ones.

Sue Anstiss (28m 3s):

And how long have you been in existence?

Mary Harvey (28m 6s):

Well, it's been, it was officially launched by our chair, Mary Robinson, the great Mary Robinson in June of 2018. And so the fall of that year, they spent, you know, putting together the business plan and launching it and then recruiting the CEO. So I was selected at the end of 2018. And 2019 I started, so I've been in the saddle since January of 2019.

Sue Anstiss (28m 33s):

And what concerns you most within sport at the moment you talk about those there's different areas that you've highlighted, but I guess what concerns you most and how do you personally balance that positivity and negativity that's bought brings?

Mary Harvey (28m 47s):

Well, I think, I think I'm just wired to be an optimist, Mary Robinson, and I share that. And as she said, I'm a prisoner of hope and I think I I'm just wired that way. I try.

Sue Anstiss (29m 2s):

I like that.

Mary Harvey (29m 3s):

I mean, that's hers, but I, yeah, I'm, that's just how I choose to view things. I think that's just something that you, you just have. What I think is one of the hardest things that we're dealing with is the sense I think of we're sports. So we're different, we're sport, we're not government and we're not business. We're different we're sport. And we have this autonomy and that doesn't work when it comes to human rights abuses it just doesn't. Governments have a duty under the UN guiding principles to protect human rights. They have a duty to protect them. Businesses have a duty to respect human rights.

Mary Harvey (29m 45s):

Where does sport land? I mean, it's a bit, I hate to say it, cause it sounds like I'm trying to pick a fight, but I'm not kind of sounds like what we've heard for a long time about religion and organized religion in the church, right? Where's the oversight for things when it comes to religion. I think when it comes to sport, when it comes to human rights, there are frameworks that can help sport navigate human rights, abuses and human rights in general. That will be very helpful for them. So what we try to do is make that bridge between, you know, you're part of a bigger community. The UN guiding principles apply to you, and we're trying to help you now navigate a world that has a bunch of phrases and concepts and acronyms that we don't understand, but there are ways to take apart how to respect human rights and companies all over the world are doing it as pillar two of the UN guiding principles.

Mary Harvey (30m 48s):

So it is possible, but I think that's the biggest challenge is sports sort of wrapping its head around actually, you know, this is our problem. We can't just say, that's not us. That's not our problem. It is our problem.

Sue Anstiss (30m 59s):

And how has sport responded to the Center for Sport and Human rights? So there's a bit of a broad question, isn't it? As the whole of sport, but how have those major international federations responded to your existence?

Mary Harvey (31m 12s):

That's a great question. I think initially fearful. I mean, if I'm just being very candid sport and human rights sounds scary, right? They're going to come after me. They're going to start naming and shaming me in public and I don't want to engage, right. I mean, that's the first, but when they get to know us, they go, huh? That's actually not what I expected. They're trying to help me. They're trying to give me practical plain spoken advice on how to handle these things. They understand me. I go walk into a room when I talk to sports bodies and I said, listen, I get it. I've been in your shoes. I've been inside a sports organization. And three years ago, I didn't understand what any of this meant.

Mary Harvey (31m 53s):

None of it. I get it. So, but here's the deal. It's not going away. We have to understand how to, how to address it. So what we're going to do is we're going to help unpack it into pieces that you may already be doing. You may be already doing a lot of this work. You don't realize it's human rights work. And secondly, there's a lot of information on how we can from other situations, understand how to mitigate some of these risks.

Sue Anstiss (32m 22s):

I listened to your recent podcasts with Minky Worden, from Human Rights Watch and heard about the, you alluded to it earlier, the serving findings about the treatment of young athletes in Japan, particularly, does it frustrate you that people aren't aware of what's happening in sport in terms of safeguarding, or do you think that they just kind of choose not to engage in and to look further?

Mary Harvey (32m 47s):

There's a little bit of burying your head in the sand. I think that has been happening, but I mean, you've seen this. If many things have happened in 2020 that we didn't expect, and one of them is athlete, activism and athlete, voice and athletes are speaking out now about a lot of things. And with that has also come more and more instances where gymnasts around the world are saying this isn't okay. The sport of ice skating, rugby with a transgender like rule, you're starting to see more and more cases of where athletes and not just athletes, whistleblowers and others saying, you know, this, this is not okay. And it's happening.

Mary Harvey (33m 27s):

It's not just one sport or another sport. It's a lot of different sports. It's not just in certain parts of the world. It's all over the world. And it's, it's systemic and what's theory because there's so many similarities between the different cases, different sports, different parts of the world, similar things.

Sue Anstiss (33m 48s):

So I guess my question then is, is that like, or two questions, really one is in using the name of your previous company, but is there a ripple effect in terms of it, a bit of a pivotal time of people calling things out and why, why has it happens now? Or was it just, we're now talking about it and airing it now

Mary Harvey (34m 6s):

For several reasons. One is, is what, what they have in common is regardless of sport, regardless of, of area of the world, you're dealing with a situation especially with elite athletes with power differentials, enormous, right? So the more elite the athlete, the more is at stake. That's not to discount how important it is for recreational sport and grassroots sport. But if you're trying to go to the Olympic games and your key to going there is through somebody who holds basically a lot of your career in the balance, that is a bad recipe for bad things happening. So, and what we're seeing is, is that there's that the, the, the sort of dynamics that are really ripe for bad things to happen, if bad people get into those positions, combined with sports bodies likely don't have a process.

Mary Harvey (35m 3s):

Or the process that they do have is subject to protecting more of the institution than the interest of the victim. So this is this whole idea of a victim centered approach and that we need survivor centered or victim centered approaches to make sure that when somebody reports, I mean, lots of things about what happens then need to be fixed. You shouldn't put the burden on the whistleblower to prove what's happening, or what's not happening, right. That's not okay. You know, I'm a coach, I think something's happening. Something doesn't look right. Something doesn't feel right. I think this might be going on. Can you look into it? That's where it starts. And then it proceeds to get broken.

Mary Harvey (35m 43s):

It's broken in several different ways as it goes from there, right? Who do they give that information to? Is that coach going to get fired? Right? So is there an independence of process that, that gives it integrity so that it, it eventually arrives at a place where the whistleblower is protected. The victim's protected. They're not asking to, you know, have to recount what happened to them, for example, in close proximity, to somebody who abused them, right? So they feel safe. All these things are, are things that are similar, similar stories across the world of there's a fear of reporting either by the victim or by whistleblowers, because the process that lies behind it, doesn't protect them.

Mary Harvey (36m 28s):

They don't feel safe. That's one of several examples of things that need to change in order for things to start to move in the right direction.

Sue Anstiss (36m 38s):

And do you feel positive that we're, so it's been a horrific year in terms of things that have been discovered and aired, but do you feel it's also a positive move forward that we are talking about these things far more?

Mary Harvey (36m 50s):

Talking about it is always going to be important. You know, I was on with Kelly Lindsay earlier today. She's a coach national team coach. She was the national team coach of the Afghan women's national team. Now she's the director of, of soccer at the Moroccan Federation. She said, we have to talk about it. She said, when I was learning, you know, going through coaching school, when I was getting my education to make coaching a profession, we never talked about this and worse, certain behaviors that are not okay were normalized as being okay. There's should be. There are, there are a lot of issues that are quite frankly, black and white, right?

Mary Harvey (37m 31s):

If you're in the workplace, if I'm back in, you know, in corporate America, and I want to have a sexual relationship with somebody that reports to me, or I report to them that everybody understands you don't do that for, for some reason in sport, there was that there's this gray area, right. It should be very black and white, somebody leaving that, you know, they're, they're always, it's never, okay. So in other areas there might be shades of gray, but let's clarify those. Let's talk about those. And so talking about it is fundamental.

Sue Anstiss (38m 4s):

And what are your major concerns right now in terms of women's access to sports in countries such as Saudi and Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan you've mentioned?

Mary Harvey (38m 14s):

You know, I used to think that access alone was key, right? It's it's about the access. Now, maybe it's just my age. Maybe it's just the experiences of what I've seen and heard. It's not enough. You can't just say, we're going to have, we're going to fund women's football at this federation, this country it's, we're going to fund women's football. And we're going to put in place safeguards to ensure that women, that female players and the female officials, referees in football in particular are even more risk. If it's possible to even imagine that there are more at risk than players, because they don't have collective voice.

Mary Harvey (38m 57s):

They don't have a team they're individuals, and they're highly, highly vulnerable to people who have 100% control over their career and their, their opportunities to advance. And, and we've already seen reports in The Guardian in Haiti of horrific cases where people have been asked to do things that are not okay, in order to advance or get assignments, or what have you. So these things, you know, are clearly areas that, that have to be addressed.

Sue Anstiss (39m 27s):

Well, we hear the term sports washing, where high profile sports events are brought to locations to almost distract potentially from a country's leadership or policy. How do you personally reconcile major events being hosted in countries, Saudi, China, Qatar, when they have poor human rights records on LGBTQ or women's rights, do you think sport can be a catalyst for improving those human rights by going to those places? Is that your belief?

Mary Harvey (39m 57s):

So that's another good question. There's a couple of different, so that's a lot right?

Sue Anstiss (40m 4s):

Conscious of time. And I haven't got you for that long. And I've got lots to ask you

Mary Harvey (40m 8s):

So I'll try to unpack that there's a couple of different ways. It's not necessarily about where you are, it's where you finish, right? So where you are when you're awarded an event, if you're awarded the event with a clear expectation that here are the human rights expectations that are in the bid, the bidding requirements, where we're going to ask you, can you acknowledge what your risks are and what you're prepared to do about them? If you're awarded this event, right? That's where we want to be. And that's what happened with a 2026 FIFA world cup bidding process is for the first time they were asking bidding countries to say, what are the risks?

Mary Harvey (40m 48s):

If you are awarded this event, what are your human rights, risks that are present right now in laws, in practice, in whatever, and, and for everything for LGBT, for women, for kids, for journalists, for, you know, people who live in the communities too. I mean, all of it, what are the risks acknowledge those? Do, do you get what those risks are? So do get it. And then secondly, what are you prepared to do about it? And so under those circumstances where then they say, here's what we're prepared to do about it. And it's not a box ticking exercise, and there is real commitment. Then there's real opportunity, right there, that's enormous opportunity, but that's, that's the prisoner of hope side of it.

Mary Harvey (41m 31s):

But, but that only is effective if have international governing bodies that put those sorts of requirements in the bidding requirements, right? So there's leverage and also that they're prepared to use it. So when things aren't as what was promised, what then happens, but look at Qatar, look at what's happening in Qatar. There's an ILO office in Qatar, International Labor Organization. And as a country that doesn't allow unions. And yet they now have a minimum wage law. They have elected representatives that represent workers to management. They have a lot of things there's still a lot to do, but that's big progress in a country that, you know, has had the world cup and was awarded the world cup 10 years ago.

Mary Harvey (42m 15s):

So it's extraordinary, what's possible, but it takes real commitment.

Sue Anstiss (42m 19s):

And looking more positively at the huge positives of sport, especially for women and girls. So why did you feel that you mentioned about in terms of the extraordinary athlete activists we've seen this summer and thinking in terms of the WPA and Naomi Osaka and Megan Rapinoe and the like, why do you feel it's it's female athletes that have been so vocal and powerful.

Mary Harvey (42m 42s):

Because we've had it, you know. You know that this is a bit of a unifier for men's and women's sports, right? The WNBA and the NBA, there's a lot of solidarity there. Right? So it, it's interesting. It's, it's really cutting across. It's not us versus them. It's very much, this is all of our problem. You know, I don't know if it's cultural or it's as women. We just, we just, maybe we've just, you know, got to a point where we say, you know, we have to, we have an opportunity to say some things finally, because there's an opportunity that people are now listening. We have a few things to say, and maybe it's pent up. Maybe, maybe it is. We just had it.

Sue Anstiss (43m 30s):

We hear so much debate about sport and politics. Do you feel the athletes should have the right to make political statements, social statements at major events, such as the Olympic games?

Mary Harvey (43m 42s):

Freedom of expression is a protected human. Right. All right. So if we're talking about limiting anyone's freedom of expression being an athlete or anybody else, there should be good reasons for it. Public safety is one, right? You can yell fire in a movie theater. So saying something incredibly provocative and incendiary in a stadium full of people, not okay. Right. I mean, so the reasons why you would do that and political statements also could be potentially highly inflammatory, but issues where you're talking about advocating for the human rights of others in a fundamentally, a peaceful way. I don't know how you limit that. If you're not disparaging someone else. I mean, I can see as an athlete myself, I've been on a podium.

Mary Harvey (44m 23s):

I've had my Olympic moment. I wouldn't want another athlete disparaging me or my country while I'm having my Olympic moment. I get that bit of it, right. Not shaking someone's hand because you know, they're from a country or what have you that I get, but for peacefully advocating for the human rights of others, and it doesn't fall foul of those things. I have a hard time understanding how you justify limiting that. I mean, in talking to FIFA, for example, they have to make decisions about, for example, at the world cup, what banners do you let into the stadium they're having to make those judgment calls on what you say yes to and what you say no to, and on what grounds.

Mary Harvey (45m 6s):

On what grounds is freedom of expression being limited. And they have a rubric for that. We're now getting into the grounds of now we're getting closer and closer to the field. Now we're on the field. Now we're on the podium. Now we're at the award ceremony. We're not in the mixed zone. It's, it's right out there. And it's sort of that last barrier. And I think people are struggling with it, but I think, you know, athletes are not going to stop speaking out. So it's here and it's probably here to stay. So I think finding a way to accommodate it in a way that's safe and respects those, the sporting, you know, sporting sort of principles that we have about competing, I think is important.

Sue Anstiss (45m 46s):

Excellent. And just finally, we've obviously seen incredible growth in women's football in the past decade. So how do you feel we can make sure that is maintained post COVID as we come out of that, but what would be your hopes and plans for that?

Mary Harvey (46m 2s):

I think first and foremost, I mean, particularly with COVID, I mean, it's hit, I mean, it's just been an absolute gut punch to sport contemplating that economic impact is it's hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around and it's going to be here for years to come, right? The impact of this, I think what's important first and foremost is to safeguard the tremendous gains that we've made in women's sport and making sure we don't go backwards. So, you know, we were out early, we also said in the APPG All Party Parliamentary Group, in which we, we convened a call with the APPG on this is, you know, the impact of COVID. And what's important right now.

Mary Harvey (46m 44s):

And we've said that any public money that is used to bail out professional sport needs to protect women and women's sport and sport for persons with disabilities, you don't get to cut wheelchair at the US open, right? Put, you know, the let's just talk about those decisions that are being made and to make sure people don't get left behind. So I think with COVID it's you want to have the growth continue, but also because of the existential threat, let's make sure that we're not going backwards. And it's important to safeguard that particularly when public funds are being used to assist different sectors.