79% of cricket volunteers who expressed a view said that males who have been through male puberty should not be allowed to compete in the female category in either amateur or professional cricket events.
Statistically, this survey gives more than 99.99% confidence that a majority of cricket volunteers who have a view do not support the England and Wales Cricket Board's new rules that allow males to compete in amateur cricket events if they identify as women.
On October 17, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) announced new rules on transgender participation in cricket which would allow males who identify as women to compete in the female category, but only in amateur events.
The survey was organised and conducted by cricket volunteers who belong to the SEEN in Sport network. The survey design and methodology was overseen by Dr John Armstrong, with assistance on question wording from Professor Alice Sullivan.
We believe that the views of cricket volunteers are particularly important as they will have to implement the rules. It is not reasonable to ask volunteers to implement rules they believe to be unsafe, unfair and discriminatory.
According to the ECB’s statement when the new rules on trans participation were announced, they “consulted widely” on the new policy. However, we are not aware of any call for evidence. We find it implausible that any properly conducted consultation would have failed to identify the fact that the overwhelming majority of volunteers do not support the ECB's position.
Our survey shows that the grassroots volunteers who run cricket clubs do not believe that fair and safe competition is less important at an amateur level than it is at a professional level.
We have contacted the ECB to tell them the results of our survey.
We surveyed cricket club volunteers in England and Wales cricket clubs to find their views on this question. We contacted clubs either by email or using their website contact form and asked whoever responded the following question.
The purpose of this survey is to gather the views of cricket volunteers on eligibility for the female category in cricket.
On October 17, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) announced new rules on transgender participation in cricket. The new rules are different for professional vs amateur cricket.
These new rules allow cricketers to compete in the female category at amateur level if they identify as a woman. However, for professional games anyone who has been through male puberty will not be eligible to compete in the female category. Cricketers who have been through male puberty will not be eligible to compete in the women’s professional category. However, in amateur cricket 'individuals are accepted in the gender they identify as'. This means that cricketers who identify as women can compete in the women’s category even if they have been through male puberty.
The rules for professional cricket apply to Tiers 1 and 2 of UK competitions and The Hundred Women's competition. The rules for amateur cricket apply to recreational cricket and Tier 3 competitions.
Which is closest to your view on what the best rules would be for cricket in England and Wales?
We contacted the clubs in a random order. We found the contact details for each club by searching for their name on Google and then visiting their website. We generated a unique code for each club contacted and only one survey response was allowed for each club. The text of the messages sent to clubs can be found here.
The raw survey results were as follows:
| Option | Number of responses |
|---|---|
| Males allowed at amateur and professional level | 4 |
| Males allowed at amateur level only | 11 |
| Males not allowed at any level | 57 |
| Don't know | 1 |
| Total | 73 |
This means that of 79% of the volunteers who expressed a view opposed the ECB's preferred option.
Before conducting the survey we determined how large a sample would be required. How large a sample one needs in a study depends on how close you think the result is likely to be. A large sample is required if you think there is near 50-50 split of opinion. However, if only a few people support one view you don't need a very large sample to see that a majority oppose the view.
In statistical studies one performs a power analysis to decide how large a sample is required. We performed a power analysis and found that we would need a sample size of 37 for our study. We received 73 responses, considerably more than was required. As we will see the survey gives a very high degree of confidence for our findings.
One way examine the statistical significance of our results is to construct a confidence interval. From our data, we can say with 95% confidence that the actual proportion of volunteers who oppose male participation in the female category at both amateur and professional level is somewhere between 68% and 88%.
Another way to examine statistical significance is through hypothesis testing. We hypothesised that a majority of respondents who express a view would oppose male participation in the female category at both amateur and professional level. Suppose on the contrary that 50% of respondents who express a view support males competing at some level. The probabiliy of us getting our results would then be less that 0.0001%. This means we have evidence in support of our hypothesis at a confidence level of 99.9999%.We used a power calculation for a binomial sample with null proportion 50%, alternative proportion 30%, performing a 1-sided test at confidence level 5% and with a power of 80%. This was a conservative estimate as we expected the proportion of volunteers who supported male participation in the female category to be about 20%, but we used the alternative proporiton of 30% in our calculation.
We would like to thank the volunteers who contacted clubs to invite them to participate in the survey and all the club volunteers we contacted, whether they answered our survey or not, for the work they do fielding correspondence for their cricket club.