03/05/2005 FIBA - FIBA Refs: only 5% are female GENEVA (Referees) - FIBA launches education program in cooperation with Zones and National Federations to reach 10% in 2007. Basketball is truly a cross gender sport and according to the FIBA statistics the basketball players around the world are approximately 60% male and 40% female. When looking at the participation of females in coaching, officiating or administration of basketball the numbers are drastically different. The FIBA Sports Department recently conducted a study on female officiating and provided the Technical Commission with the results. In June 2004, 996 referees worldwide were holding a FIBA license of which 55 were females. This represented only 5.5% of the total FIBA referee pool. These figures are obviously far below the female player's participation in basketball. The figures per continent are as follows: Asia 11 (3.6%), Americas 29 (10.5%), Africa 4 (2.3%), Europe 7 (3.2%), and Oceania 4 (18.2%). "We estimate that worldwide approximately 350.000 referees are active in our 212 federations", said FIBA Sports Director Lubomir Kotleba. "The percentage there is believed to be also not more than 5%. It is our goal to raise this number. Not only because we are keen to strengthen the role of women in sport, but also because we believe that there is a huge potential. Especially when female players stop playing, it is important to us to keep them and their expertise in the game as referees, coaches and administrators." Reasons for the low percentage may be the lack of incentives, the career end of some female players after being married or having children, or the traditional role of women in some countries. Therefore the FIBA Women's Commission and the FIBA Technical Commission initiated last year a program in order to increase the percentage of females engaged in the officiating of basketball games. All FIBA Zones were provided with "Winning Women", a document developed by Basketball Australia which provides the guidelines for recruiting and training female referees. It describes the steps to be taken from how to become a national referee up to the possibility of obtaining a FIBA Referee License. The goal is to reach 10% of the active FIBA referees to be female in the year 2007. All FIBA Zones are now preparing and adapting their own programs reaching down to each national basketball federation. The federations will be asked to organise the Clinics for Female Referees, followed by the FIBA Zone Clinics. FIBA will hold such a clinic during its FIBA World Championship in Brazil in September 2006. FIBA Asia has already started its programmes and at the latest two FIBA Clinics for Referee Candidates in Kuala Lumpur and Seoul, 7 females (out of 21 candidates) from Myanmar, Macao, Singapore, Malaysia and Korea attended the clinic and 6 of them qualified for the FIBA Referee License. The FIBA Asia Clinic will be held on 16th - 21st September in Tehran, Iran, only for female referees from West Asia and Gulf countries and similar clinic will be held for the rest of Asian countries in March 2006 in Kuala Lumpur. A quota for female referees would be the completely wrong direction, according to Lubomir Kotleba: "I am strongly against any quotas for female referees. The only criteria should be the quality of the officiating of any given individual. As valid for players, out of 1000 young referees you may have 50 good, 10 very good and 1 excellent. Therefore we must make our basketball female base stronger in order to have, at the very end, excellent FIBA female referees, for the good of basketball in general and for female basketball in particular." --

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