“Racing Home: Working mothers in the horseracing industry” is the outcome of a year-long project undertaken by Women in Racing, Oxford Brookes University and Simply Racing funded by The Racing Foundation and Kindred Group.
The project was launched in November 2019 at a symposium which was attended by 65+ key industry stakeholders.
The event kick-started further discussion about what it feels like to be a working mother in the horseracing industry at a series of workshops/webinars with participants from across the sport.
Tallulah Lewis, Chair of Women In Racing, welcomed the findings and hopes they can act as a catalyst for change.
"We are very pleased with the work that Oxford Brookes University have done in highlighting the challenges faced by working mothers in the horseracing industry," she said.
"These are issues that are not unique to the horseracing industry and are prevalent for all women who are thinking about becoming mothers or who already are, what is important is the impact on horseracing maintaining a sustainable workforce so we were very happy that this came out in the research and that we have some solutions that can make the working environment better for mothers and parents."
So what can be done both in the short and long term?
"The first step is communication; motherhood has become a taboo subject and with women making up the majority of our industry workforce we need to change this," Lewis argued.
"There are so many benefits and significant opportunity for us as an industry to make real change that can ensure our wonderful industry continues and this, believe starts with us all having a conversation about what we can do.
"In terms of long term next steps, a key element in the report and something that we wanted to ensure was produced was the list of solutions, these are our starting point and we have had endorsement from all industry stakeholders to collaborate with us on delivering these."
And the good news for racing's workforce is some changes should be quick to implement.
"There are some really easy quick wins for us with the short term solutions that will make a significant improvement to the working environment for mothers and parents and we will look to start rolling these out towards the end of the year," Lewis revealed.
"So hopefully we will start seeing some improvements, I think the fact that we have started the conversation is already a vast improvement on where we were so we are looking forward to seeing where implementing the solutions takes us. "
Despite the current landscape Lewis heads into 2021 feeling optimistic about Women In Racing being able to play a key role in such an important area for the industry.
"Rather than challenges i think we have opportunities, our biggest opportunity is that we have solutions for a large proportion of our workforce and we are looking forward to collaborating with other industry stakeholders on delivering them," she said.
"Our hope for 2021 is that we can make a real impact on individuals within the industry and work with them to keep our great industry sustainable."
