Peta Bee: British Women Must Stand Up, Then Go for a Run

Why the female half of the British population persistently resists the temptation to get knackered and sweaty playing sport is a topic that resurfaces with tiresome regularity. There cannot be a woman out there who is not bored of hearing yet another statistic that declares she is contributing to the expanding girth of her generation through her slothfulness. And to what end? To date no scheme to buck the trend appears to have worked. Perhaps, though, they have simply been pressing the wrong buttons.

That, at least, is the view of experts and opinion leaders working with the Women's Sports Foundation. A major initiative being launched by the WSF at the House of Commons next week aims to switch the focus from investigating not the physical but the psychological barriers that prevent many girls and women from raising themselves off their sofas more often.

The SPA (Sport and Physical Activity) campaign differs from previous attempts to tackle this problem in seeking to influence not the circumference of a woman's hips or her reading on the scales but her attitude.

Olympic successes and other high-profile achievements by sportswomen in the past 12 months have had little effect on the amount of female involvement in sport, which seems stuck at an all- time low. Countless reports illustrate this rejection of physical activity.

Forty per cent of girls drop out of it by the time they are 18, never to resume similar levels of exercise throughout their adulthood; one third of six- to eight-year-olds do less than an hour of PE a week at school; and a survey by Sport England reveals that girls as young as seven are being put off sport for good.

What is remarkable, considering the amount of groundwork and funding that went into producing such alarming findings, is that few have thought to ask women why they are bolstering these inactivity figures and, crucially, what might be done to change their thinking.

Those that have produced an insight into what deters girls from playing sport - a Mori report commissioned by Sport England found that "getting their hair wet" or "having to shower afterwards" was enough to put young women off physical activity - have clearly failed to implement effective strategies to overturn these negative opinions.

But it is on the psyche of sport-phobic females that the SPA programme hopes to impact most deeply. Already some aspects of the comprehensive campaign are being rolled out in communities around the United Kingdom. A focus group has been set up in Tower Hamlets, where young mothers of children under three, who are of mixed ethnicity and mainly from lower socio-economic groups, are being asked for their views about why they abstain from sport.

Elsewhere Dr David Carless, of the University of Bristol's department of health and exercise science, is working with the WSF to uncover what prevents women over 60 living in rural Cornwall from being more physically active. A third investigation will centre on the attitudes towards sport of 14- to 18- year-old girls living in urban Manchester.

What the researchers expect to find is that women everywhere, regardless of age and background, are increasingly resistant to the blame culture that attempts to prompt them into exercising more by making them feel guilty about not doing enough. All too often negative messages - about weight, about health and about body image - are used to raise public awareness of the positive benefits of physical activity. Yet in many cases that serves only to compound a woman's self-criticism.

And perhaps, thinks the WSF, that is where it has all been going wrong. Instead, from the qualitative findings obtained from their focus groups, the WSF plans to implement clearly defined strategies that address the unique factors identified by women as deterrents to sport.

They do not expect an overnight solution nor for it to be simple to employ. Yet it is ironic that, after years of paper-shuffling and high-powered government initiatives, ordinary women from all walks of life could be the ones to come up with the answers we have been waiting to hear.