Gender Inequality in Sports

Gender Inequality in Sports

For many female sports players, sports writers, and sports fans, the competition doesn’t end out on the field--beyond the ring and rink, women have to compete with society and at times with each other for respect, visibility, and legitimacy. Sports are a tool with which we affirm societal values; courage, determination, national identity. Athletes are elevated, entrusted with hopes and reverence of the people. People pay to have a successful athlete’s name grace the back of their replica jersey--it’s an affect of aspiration, an idolization you take with you when you leave the house.

When women’s achievements and success are deemed a distant secondary to their male counterparts, women’s-only competition is not progress or inclusion but segregation.

The winning basketball coach is a woman. The all-time leading U.S. soccer goal scorer is a woman. Yet women still do not feel safe attending sporting events, or participating in sports communities. For women to truly bring out the best in each other on the designated sporting apparatus, we must work to dispel some of the worst in society: misogyny, erasure, rape culture, transphobia.

What work remains? How do we set about it? Who’s already doing it? We pose these questions to our fabulous panel of guest contributors, assembled from every facet of sports culture, and present their dispatches as testimony of a contest without set rules, referees, or a finish line yet in sight.

But we can all agree that no job should involve persistent—and potentially dangerous—harassment.

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No one thought they were being cheeky; they truly believed that women and fat people were less adequate.