Tuesday 8 March marks International Women's Day and we caught up with six incredible women involved with the AOC to share their careers, how they've seen the sport industry evolve, what they're most proud of about female representation in sport and more.

Alice Bowen, Games Operations Manager

Alice Bowen is at the heart of everything behind the scenes to get an Australian Team to a Games, to be comfortable at the Games and returned safely.

Coming up on her four-year anniversary as Games Operations Manager for the AOC, she takes the lead for the team organising flights, accommodation, uniforms, accreditation and making Athlete Villages a home away from home.

Bowen has carved out a career in sport ever since graduating with a Bachelor of Sport Management in 2005.

“My first foot in the door was in an administration role with NSW Rugby League.”

Through hard work and determination Bowen was promoted to an operational event management role and later recruited for the 2008 Rugby League World Cup.

“I was an executive assistant for that World Cup which was a really good opportunity to see all the different areas of how sport works and to meet a lot of different people.

“It was a great first step for me in my career to network and understand how sport works.”

A deep passion for sport has seen her take on operations roles at Swimming Australia, Rugby Australia, at another Rugby League World Cup in 2017 and now the AOC.

“It had always been a goal of mine to try and get to the AOC one day.

“We’ve got so many strong women at the AOC. It’s really nice to see a diverse workplace.

“When I first started in sport I didn’t see many female role models out there. I didn’t see many females in leadership positions. I’ve seen a massive inclusiveness and awareness shift for the roles we play as women in sport.

“You look at our female athletes, they’re very successful, strong, confident and being recognised for their achievements.

“Having a woman in sport and doing well shouldn’t be a special thing. It needs to be normalised through breaking down the barriers.”

Barbara Meyer, Sport Psychologist

“People often say to me ‘how did you, from the mid-west in the United States, get involved with Australian sport?’”

Barbara Meyer is the Lead Sport Psychologist for the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia (OWIA) and has worked with them between Wisconsin and Australia since 2001. Her first task was to work alongside Alisa Camplin and her coach to prepare for Salt Lake 2002, at which Alisa became Australia’s first female to win a Winter Olympic gold medal. Just two days after Steven Bradbury won Australia’s first gold.

In 2005-06 Meyer was part of the team that helped Alisa bounce back from tearing the same ACL twice within 51 weeks and just four months out from Torino 2006, where she went on to miraculously claim the bronze medal.

After Lydia Lassila won gold at Vancouver 2010, she made the decision to start a family and keep progressing her aerial skiing career.

Meyer thinks the way the OWIA, Australian Institute of Sport and the Australian Olympic Committee supported Lydia through it all was a true sign of an unprecedented commitment to assisting female athletes.

“They said to Lydia ‘How are we going to make this work for you and your family? You can take some time off, you can start your family and then we’re going to find a way to get you back and accommodate your new and unique needs as an athlete mum.’”

When Meyer first started working in sport as a graduate student in 1988, there was a much different attitude towards women in the workplace.

“The only role men saw a woman having in an elite sport organisation was as a psychologist.

“There are just more of us [now] in elite sport in both traditional and non-traditional roles. That’s been amazing to see.”

With a unique perspective on the sporting achievements of Australian women, Meyer has noticed a global impact.

“Australian women in all realms of the sport industry [internationally] are well known for performing at a really high level on the world stage.”

On International Women’s Day she has suggestions on how to help close the equality gap for women.

“If you see something, say something. Find one thing that you can commit to which will facilitate women’s progress in this space, and then try to make it a habit.”

Kate Blamey, Freestyle Moguls Coach

‘In the future there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.’

It’s a powerful Sheryl Sandberg quote which Kate Blamey, the NSW Institute of Sport’s Freestyle Moguls Coach, loves as a reminder that nothing should hold women back.

“I’m excited for the future of women in sport.

“I love that IWD gives us an opportunity to reflect on not only ourselves as women but also the wonderful women around us, whether they be colleagues, friends or athletes.

“Our female athletes are strong, bold and determined. Our female high-performance staff are highly skilled, dedicated and passionate. Our female administrators are talented, intelligent and decisive decision makers.

Blamey’s parents always used to tell her ‘you can do anything you set your mind to’ and it’s evident that’s had a lasting effect on her career to date.

She worked her way up to becoming an Olympic Winter Institute of Australia moguls coach for the Beijing 2022 Team after being successful in USA programs.

As an 18-year-old Blamey started coaching at Mount Buller, where she grew up skiing, while training full-time as an athlete and studying a Bachelor of Exercise and Sport Science.

Once she decided to stop being an athlete, Blamey gave a full-time commitment to coaching in multiple Australian programs while completing a Master’s Degree in Human Nutrition. Coaching was just a job to her at the time, but once her studies finished it was all she wanted to do – which led to chasing overseas experience.

“My role as head coach for a high-level club program (in the USA) was a great stepping stone in my career as I learnt more about the sport and who I was as a coach.

“I think over the past few years we have seen people come to the realisation that not only can women coach as well as men, in fact, they have supplementary skills intrinsic to their upbringing and experience as a woman that helps them to understand and relate to athletes in a way a lot of men may struggle to.

“Once we started to understand this, the industry has evolved pretty quickly to give power and opportunities to people that have the right skills for the job regardless of whether they are male or female.”

Amie Wallis, Head of People & Culture

Since joining the AOC four years ago as Head of People & Culture, Amie Wallis has overseen a substantial amount of support and increased consideration for women in all areas of the organisation.

She is passionate about eliminating the gender lens from workplaces and turning awareness for equality into action.

“We are always recruiting the best person for the role, but that best person has to fit in the context of what the whole of the team looks like, considering the balance of skill and diversity within that team,” Wallis said.

While the AOC has an equal 50/50 gender split across the organisation, she also wants to ensure diversity and equality exists beyond the numbers.

“I think a lot of people think gender bias isn’t there anymore, but it is.

“Sport needs to be open to creating experiences to enable diversity and to enable gender balance through all of the different roles that are available in sport.

“If we only allow people to move through the system that have had experience, then the same people are going to keep moving through the system.”

Wallis, a mother of three who has looked after thousands of employees in her career across KPMG, NAB, IBM and more, has a strong appreciation for working in sport and at the AOC.

“I love working in sport because you work with people who are really passionate about something and want to be there. It’s so family orientated and you can bring your whole self to the organisation.

“It makes me proud to work for an organisation that has a history of gender equality in high performance.”

Her start in the sport industry came at the Victorian Racing Club and over time Wallis has seen a shift in demand for diversity in sport sponsorships.

“Sponsors and stakeholders in sport are looking for diversity. I have certainly seen expectations from sponsors, stakeholders and employees change where they are very much looking to support or work with organisations actively and explicitly supporting diversity.”

Mel Omizzolo, Deputy Lead Physio

More than 20 years before Mel Omizzolo was Australian Team’s Deputy Lead Physio at Tokyo 2020, she started out as a student working in football in 1998.

“When I was a student I was doing some local work and there were hardly any other females involved in sport. Interestingly the only other females involved would have been the trainers."

Omizzolo got her first opportunity to work in tennis in 2005 on the WTA pro tour and put in an eight-year stint, after which she switched to Tennis Australia in 2014 and has been the National Physiotherapy Manager ever since.

Her reflection on how the sport industry has evolved comes from two decades of experience.

“There’s more females around and it makes a huge difference with the type of conversations you can have amongst the room. I think it’s great for the men too.

“I don’t want to work just with females, I like working with males too and I think it’s really important to have that mix. One of the big reasons I work in tennis is because we have that equality.”

She has a long and close working relationship with Ash Barty and the 2022 Australian Open champion’s nation-wide influence has not been lost on Omizzolo.

“To see where Ash has come over the last five years in the sporting landscape, but also in the Australian public has been huge. I think she’s a great role model for all Australians regardless of gender.

“The fact we refer to her as Australia’s no.1 or the world no.1, not the female no.1, she’s recognised within her own right. We should hold all women in the same regard as male athletes in Australia.”

Outside of tennis, Omizzolo knows there is still a lot of change needed to foster equality for women.

“We’ve made gains in terms of women being more involved in the elite level of sport, but I still think it’s easy for women to become pigeonholed in sport.

“I’d love to see more women as CEOs in sporting organisations, as high-performance directors and as coaches across any gender and managing teams of men.

“I feel each year we are getting there, we have more diversity in the room and differences of opinion being respected.”

Julie Dunstan, Senior Media Manager

Julie Dunstan is the Senior Media Manager at the AOC working in the Public Affairs and Communications Dept. In her time at the AOC she has been a member of the “team behind the team” for 10 Australian Olympic Teams across 7 Summer and 3 Winter Games.

Julie’s role involves managing the media operations for an Olympic Team, advising the media how they should plan their Olympic coverage, communicating to the media how and when they can access athletes during the Games to report about their performances and inspiring stories as well as balancing those needs with the performance objectives of the Team. It requires managing a team of anywhere between 5 – 20 plus media professionals who can deliver those media plans confidently and navigating it all in an Olympic environment with its many guidelines, broadcast rights commitments, commercial and media obligations.

Below are her thoughts about IWD.

“International Women’s Day means many things to me.

It is an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women and the increasing visibility of the great work they are doing across all areas from workplaces to communities, and in my case, sporting arenas.

Since my time with the AOC their has been a fundamental shift in Australia in terms of how women are recognised and celebrated.

The Olympic Games is a powerful platform from which to share inspirational stories of human excellence and achievement. Australia’s female athletes and women in leadership roles have been and will continue to show a whole new generation of young girls what is possible and what can be achieved.

Working with world class journalists and broadcasters in sport, we have seen a big shift in how women’s sport is reported. That is not only due to there being more female journalists in prominent reporting, hosting and management roles, but also because of those men who have supported women’s sport and promoted their profiles and stories.

Can more be done? Absolutely! But the strides that have been taken in recent years and the influence women have had on the media landscape should not be underestimated.

What has inspired me over the decades and what is truly important as we mark International Women’s Day is celebrating and amplifying the work that organisations are doing now that will best serve our next generation of girls and boys, across all industries. To grow up in a world where their strengths as individuals are recognised regardless of their gender and embracing inclusion and diversity for all.

For leaders to champion a recruitment process where our next generation are appointed to roles they rightfully deserve and have earned, empowering them to deliver those roles without restriction. To me that is achieving true equality. To me that signals “breaking the bias”.

At the Tokyo Olympic Games, Australia saw 53% of the Olympic team made up of women. That was not only a testament to the hard work of Australia’s female athletes, but the commitment from the IOC to ensure gender equality at the Olympic Games. This has provided more opportunities than ever before for women to compete and is a commitment the AOC welcomes and advocates.

It’s significant decisions such as these and promotion of gender balance in sport that will inspire our young Australians to tackle their chosen path without even considering things like ‘gender bias’ - but just to know anything is possible.
My role at the AOC has evolved over time and working in sport with the media, our member sports and Olympians is a dynamic environment.

Today is a day I can thank the people (both men and women) who over the years taught me what I know today, encouraged me, influenced me and recognised my efforts as a woman in the media and sport industry.

Today is a day to recognise the countless Olympians I have witnessed over time that defy the odds with their hard work and talent and then use their success and platforms to create change or stand up for a cause for the benefit of their sport or to contribute to the wider social good. It is that role modelling that will make a difference to our future generations, their decision making skills, their growth, their attitude, their treatment and behaviour towards others – all others.

As a senior staff member at the AOC I hope that in my own way, I am contributing to the behaviour change that will pay dividends for my children and other young Australians.