Football and gender equality: who is Salima Mukansanga, the first female referee at the Africa Cup of Nations. Gender equality in football — in Cameroon, here is another step forward
The world of football has taken another small step towards gender equality. It happened at the Africa Cup of Nations, where for the first time in the competition's history a woman was part of a refereeing team. Originally from Rwanda, 33-year-old Salima Mukansanga took on the role of "fourth official" (assisting the referee and the two assistants from the touchline in managing the match) in the Guinea–Malawi game, a Group B fixture of the tournament currently under way in Cameroon.
A former promising player in African women's basketball, at the age of 18 Mukansanga decided to give up her dream of the sport and enrol on a refereeing course. Since then, she has come a long way: first the 2018 Under-17 Women's World Cup, then the top women's competition the following year; and then the officiating of the women's final at the Tokyo Olympics, won against all expectations by Canada. All that remained was the big leap into men's tournaments, and it has arrived at the most important one for the entire African continent — the 33rd edition — an edition marked by a decidedly turbulent build-up: originally scheduled for June 2021, the Africa Cup of Nations was first brought forward to January of that same year due to Cameroon's difficult weather conditions during the summer months, only to then be pushed back to this winter because of the pandemic emergency.
The Rwandan referee is not the only woman included in the list of 63 match officials available for the tournament; alongside her are Moroccan referees Fatiha Jermoumi and Bouchra Karboubi, as well as Cameroonian Carine Atemzabong. But none of them yet holds the qualification to referee a match, unlike Salima, who is already on the list of international referees of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa).
Since 2017, the Fifa referees committee has been chaired by Pierluigi Collina, by far the finest Italian referee of the past 20 years. And many back home have compared Mukansanga to the former referee from Bologna, for her decisive temperament and her ability to handle the most complex situations on the pitch. In an interview some years ago, Collina declared: "I would like to talk about referees without having to inflect the word as masculine or feminine." A great deal is moving in this direction at international level, above all thanks to Frenchwoman Stéphanie Frappart, who has already refereed matches in the English Premier League and the men's Uefa Champions League.
Ukrainian Kateryna Monzul, meanwhile, refereed the men's Europa League match between Gent and Slovan Liberec alongside two female colleagues, forming the competition's first all-female refereeing trio. On 8 January, Rebecca Welch took charge of the match between Birmingham City and Plymouth Argyle, the first time a woman had officiated a men's FA Cup third-round tie. In Italy, meanwhile, on 10 May last year Maria Marotta became the first woman to referee a Serie B match, Reggina–Frosinone. But Serie A remains a taboo still to be broken.