There’s no pleasing everyone, and that’s certainly true with the decision by F1 to scrap ‘grid girls’.

Some applauded the decision when it was first announced back in late January, and almost immediately others rose up to defend the tradition.

One of those defending the gig was Hannah James, who spent nine years as a grid girl before the axe came down.

Next up to the plate is 25-year-old Melissa James, who may or may not be related to Hannah, and her side of the story made it all the way to CNN.

Melissa wasn’t packing any punches, with some of her reasoning below:

I absolutely loved it. You want me to wear a super comfortable outfit and go to the VIP areas and watch what I was already going to pay to watch? Yeah, that’s fine by me. It was a dream job.

…Everything you’ve ever work for — it’s just taken off you.

Sucks when your dream job is snatched from before your very eyes.

Melissa also went on to add that she feels the role a grid girl plays has been minimised, but that the race day experience would diminish without their presence:

“The drivers are focused on wanting to win the race, they don’t want to schmooze, they don’t want to have conversations — so that’s when ‘grid girls’ come in,” James, from Birmingham in the United Kingdom, says.

“You’re not just standing there on the concrete. You’re meeting fans, you’re posing with photos and, because you’ve got the branding on your clothes, it’s going out on Instagram.

“Saying that we’re just a pretty face is absolutely ludicrous. We’re saleswomen at the end of the day. We need to learn how to talk to people and get people on board with the product.”

Of course critics argue just the opposite, saying that their roles are merely to be ogled at, and The Women’s Sport Trust, a charity which promotes gender equality in sports, applauded the decision to end their association with F1.

The motorsport industry isn’t the only bone of contention, with the decision spurring other organisations to take action:

The decision to ban F1 “grid girls” came just four days after the Professional Darts Corporation also announced it would no longer be using “walk-on girls” to accompany men onto the stage.

Another “grid girl,” Rebecca Cooper, has also been vocal on Twitter about January’s announcement, saying that recent bans are “political correctness gone mad.”

Here’s one such tweet from Rebecca:

Mercedes’ F1 chief Toto Wolff believes the sport itself has to make greater efforts to increase representation:

[He] said the lack of female presence in the sport won’t go unnoticed this year, adding that women need to be encouraged to join the motorsport industry in other ways.

“We need to get more females into the sport in marketing, communications, engineering and as racing drivers. We at Mercedes will try to support that as much as we can,” he says.

Melissa herself can have the final say, seeing as though she is the one who watched her dream job disappear in a puff of dust:

“They say we need protection and that we’re so vulnerable — we’re not,” she says, adding that if women didn’t want to do the job, or didn’t want the attention, they wouldn’t apply.

You can bet this debate is going to rage on for some time to come.

[source:cnn]