Female Refs Call Men’s Fouls

In 2015, Akhona Makalima became one of the first women to referee a men’s Premier Soccer League game in South Africa. She’s since officiated many high-profile men’s and women’s matches, locally and around the world. Makalima grew up in the impoverished Eastern Cape dreaming of being a soccer player, she says, but the infrastructure didn’t support that path. So in 2011, she completed refereeing certifications in a program run by the South African Football Association (SAFA) designed to get more women refs on the pitch. The rest is history, but it wasn’t without bumps. In a career spanning seven years, her greatest challenge remains: to stop people from “doubting me in a male dominated sport,” she says. Calm and confidence are key to “blocking out the noise” and focusing on her dream — one that she hopes other girls will share.

Two female rugby refs have made significant contributions to their sport: Amy Perret in Australia and Aimee Barrett-Theron in South Africa. In 2020, Perret became the first woman to officiate a Super Rugby match, a major men's club competition in Australia and the Pacific. She had also officiated at the 2014 Women’s Rugby World Cup final in Paris. Growing up in a rugby-obsessed family no doubt helped fuel her interest in the sport — she even played on a boy’s rugby team until she was 12.

Barrett-Theron also got into rugby first by playing it. She played for the national South African women’s team from 2008 to 2012. In 2014 she took up refereeing and in 2021 became the first woman to referee a United Rugby Championships (URC) match, one of the highest levels of the sport. At the game Barrett-Theron made headlines for her comments while breaking up a scuffle between the players: “I came all the way here to referee a rugby match, not look after children.”

When it comes to the challenges faced by women officiators, “there seems to be less on-the-field issues than off it,” explains Philip Broster, a sociology lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town. Sexist abuse on social media is just one of the many challenges women refs encounter. Broster’s research on women refereeing suggests that professional rugby players are not interested in the gender of officials — they simply want to get on with the game and tend “to see the referee as a referee.” He doesn’t know how the male players feel about it privately, but he thinks it’s in the players’ best interests to “simply deal with a woman official as they would any male equivalent.”

Often the players actually forget the gender of their refs: Barrett-Theron says she's been referred to as “Sir” or “Mr. Ref” a few times. That’s a good thing for a referee, Broster explains, because they generally want to be an “invisible presence in the game.'' Rugby ref Perrett expressed a similar sentiment after refereeing that first Super Rugby match — one that grabbed much media attention. In an interview with World Rugby, Perrett said, “I wanted to just fly under the radar a bit and let my refereeing do the talking, not get the build-up about it being a female in the middle.”

Change is happening. Broster started his research in 2019 after learning that rugby was actively trying to include women referees. Rugby is making a concerted effort “to change the image around the game” and women referees are very much at the center, he says. World Rugby has even made the names of their tournaments gender neutral.

Broster credits women’s appearance in what were once perceived as “male sports'' with creating new narratives and cultures throughout the world. For example, the Spanish women’s rugby team are creating new rivalries not seen in the men’s game. In soccer, large family-friendly crowds are being drawn to women’s tournaments in the UK, a stark contrast to the aggressive stadium atmospheres of the men’s game.