ASIAN WOMEN IN SPORT Archie Kalyana was hired by BBC Sport last year as Diversity Producer for Cricket. Kalyana scouts’ players, coaches and media staff involved in cricket, to ensure there is diversity of ethnic backgrounds among them.
The BBC hired Kalyana in November 2019 because they saw that there was a lack of both people of colour and women in cricket. When I spoke to Kalyana on a stormy Sunday evening, her passion and enthusiasm for her job shone through, with her telling me that she practically skips to work and loves her job. “It took me twenty-three years to get to this point in my career”, she says. “And I can see how much change has happened”. She is referring increased equality for women, talking about ‘Me Too’, and the United Nations ‘He For She’ campaign. “It is our responsibility to tell the stories of women to encourage girls that there are people out there who look like them and that also love doing what they do. We need role models, women who look like us – where are they?” As well as there being a lack of role models, she thinks that there are a number of reasons preventing women from participating in sport, questioning whether local clubs are professional enough. For instance, those who do not live in a big city, may be denied the resources, facilities and funding needed to help girls get into major leagues of their chosen sport disciplines. Added to this, Kalyana feels that it is around the age of thirteen, that girls begin to drop out of sports due to having poor body image. One of Kalyana’s biggest career achievements is when she won the Asian Women of Achievement Award in 2019, after being nominated by a producer friend. She tells me how proud she was of the female Asian community at the ceremony. Being an Asian woman herself, Kalyana has a career commitment to get women - particularly Asian women into sports, and to put them on the map, so to speak. She tells me about her travels to Pakistan with her job, saying how momentous it was last year, as the Sri Lankan cricket team went to Pakistan for the Cricket World Cup – this was the first time in ten years, after the Sri Lankan team buses were attacked with guns and grenades in 2009. With her job,
Photo courtesy of Archie Kalyana
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“We need role models, women who look like us - where are they?”
Move Your Body
