Accomplished businesswoman and general manager Melissa King has been appointed Surf Life Saving Australia’s first ever female CEO.
King’s appointment to the top job comes following an extensive national and international search for the perfect candidate. She has been employed by the organisation since July 2013, when she was appointed its general manager for communications and business development.
“Melissa King was competitively hired in 2013 and has made a significant impact as a part of the change management program. She has substantial multi-sector experience and has lead high functioning teams that have had a major impact,” Surf Life Saving president Graham Ford said.
King will replace Greg Nance, outgoing CEO, who will retire in June of this year. King will begin her tenure as chief executive on July 1, 2015.
Before being hired by Surf Life Saving as a general manager, King served five years as the Sydney Opera House’s group manager for corporate partnerships and two years with the APEC 2007 taskforce as a manager for sponsorship and business relations. Earlier in her decorated career she spent three years as the director of marketing and development at Chartered Secretaries Australia.
“I am proud to take on the role of CEO of Surf Life Saving Australia, the peak water coastal safety organisation in the country. It is made up of incredible people that do extraordinary things and I look forward to working with the SLSA Board in guiding the organisation towards a long term sustainable future,” King said.
The appointment of Surf Life Saving’s first female CEO is a welcome one, as women in top roles in the sporting world are still very few and far between.
In 2014, women made up only 18% of CEOs of Australian sports organisations, only 12% of chairs and only 28% of board directors. What’s worse is that these figures are in decline; the percentage of CEOs and chairs has dropped from percentages in the early twenties in 2009 to 18% and 12% in 2014.
Australia currently comes in 15th in the world for representation of women in sporting organisations.
In the United States, these figures are worse still. As of 2014, there were no female general managers leading teams in any of the four major professionals sports leagues – nor had there ever been any women in these executive roles.
As we have witnessed recently, women are still so rare at the top executive level in sport that when they do get appointed to C-suite roles, they are described differently to the men leading Australia’s sporting world. When the NRL appointed Suzanne Young is Chief Operating Officer, headlines described her as a “mother of three”.
The glacial progress when it comes to women’s representation in sport is not limited to the executive world – female athletes are also persistently being undervalued, under leveraged and under sponsored. Female athletes are still missing from lists of the world’s highest earning sportspeople.
Meanwhile, broadcast coverage of women’s sport is also declining. The Australian Sports Commission’s report Toward a level playing field: Sport and gender in Australia media paints a bleak picture of women’s sports coverage. Currently, women get only 7% of all sports programming in Australia. This figure is lower than it was ten years ago.
When it comes to broadcast sports news programs, the numbers aren’t much better. Men’s sport is featured in 81% of sports news coverage, whereas women’s sport gets only 8.7%.
“To put this into context, horse racing received more air time than women’s sport in Australian television news,” the report says.
The report also makes clear that the decline in women’s sports coverage is not representative of reality; that it is occurring despite “the ongoing successes and strong participation levels of women in sport”.
Australian sporting organisations and sports media have a long way to go when it comes to women’s representation, but Surf Life Saving’s newly minted female CEO is a step in the right direction.