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.
If you’re okay with the daily reminder that you don’t belong, you just might make it.
We may not have a female president in 2016 but we will have the first full-time female official in the National Football League.
Horse racing allows women to compete against each other without regard to their gender. Why, then, are there so few female jockeys?
The culture around sports (and especially high school football fandom) made it difficult not to internalize a lot of harmful assumptions.
The world of women’s wrestling operates by its own particular standards of objectification, equality, and the glass ceiling.
Who says watching female athletes is boring or not as exciting as watching men? Not these little girls.
No one thought they were being cheeky; they truly believed that women and fat people were less adequate.