Fighting injustice in sport

In September, Prof. Dr Franz Konstantin Fuss was an expert witness in the Sports Committee of the Bundestag. As Chair of Biomechanics at the University of Bayreuth, he researches, among other things, sports engineering and technologies. Time and again he comes across gender inequalities.

"It is often the case that women only have the option of choosing between men's or children's products," says Prof. Fuss. He has been researching in this area for many years; before moving to the University of Bayreuth, he did so for 15 years in Australia, and before that in Singapore. Among other things, his research even led to the development of a special ball for the Australian women's football league. "We first had to research the ideal weight and circumference back then," he says. In the meantime, this ball has become standard in Australian women's football.

With his research, Prof. Dr. Franz Konstantin Fuss is explicitly working to make the sports world more suitable for women. The University of Bayreuth has also been dealing with gender inequalities for a few months in the project "One University - One Book" by reading and working on the book "The Patriarchy of Things, Why the World Doesn't Fit Women" by Rebekka Endler in different ways. In the chapter "Pink it - Shrink it", for example, the author describes that many things, including sporting goods, are "adapted" for women by giving them a new colour and simply making them smaller. Prof. Fuss' research also fits this in the broadest sense. In his years of research, he has shown that ergonomics does not only depend on the size of a product. In the Sports Committee of the Bundestag, he therefore also recommended an initiative for funded scientific research into the interaction of female athletes and sports equipment in order to identify gender-unsuitable products and subsequently develop gender-appropriate as well as gender-specific sports products.

The latest project at the Chair of Biomechanics of Prof. Fuss also highlights a topic from precisely this complex field. There, the running style of women is currently being researched in order to develop suitable running shoes for women. "So far, there is no literature on the subject," says Fuss. That is why it is difficult for sports equipment manufacturers to design shoes for the female running style. In a three-year project, partly co-financed by a running shoe manufacturer, PhD student Tizian Scharl, Dr.-Ing. Michael Frisch and Prof Fuss are now researching together with Senior Lecturer Dr. Clara Usma-Mansfield from Deakin University in Victoria to develop a running shoe specifically for women. "Running style research and shoe optimisation are running in parallel," explains Fuss. This research is based on parametric design. Put simply, geometries are created based on initial parameters. Logical rules are then developed that describe the model and the relationships between the objects and thus adapt the product (i.e. the running shoe) according to the results from the running analysis.

"We are only at the very beginning of working out the inequalities in sport," says Prof. Fuss. Children or people with disabilities are also still strongly disadvantaged. Hearing Prof. Fuss in the Sports Committee was a first step to work on solutions with scientific know-how. The connections to the sports committee will continue and Fuss will be invited back as an expert in the further processing.