Sports, A Man's Game?

Athletic competition, a widely touted vanguard for equality— every individual can compete as long as they have the physical capacity to succeed. For many, it’s seen as the equalizer in societies. We’ve heard it a billion times; a talented kid grows up in an impoverished ghetto and eventually makes millions of dollars doing what he loves whether it be soccer, basketball, or baseball, you name a sport and this story has a place in it.

However, is this image of sports really as true to its appearance as it should be? Take race for instance. Racism is talked about as an artifact in so many sports— Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the MLB (Major League Baseball Association) nearly 60 years ago, and Jeremy Lin has infiltrated the NBA (National Basketball Association) for Asian Americans everywhere. But is it really gone? In perhaps, the most global sport of all— football, or as Americans refer to it, soccer, racism is a very real problem. Players are forced to walk-off of fields in the midst of competition due to the physical and verbal abuse they face on a daily basis (you can read more here). And sometimes racist sentiment in the sport leads to even more, recently resulting in an arson attack against recruited Arab players in Israel.

However, there exists an even greater gap of inequality for a different group of people. Today I want to focus on a bias towards roughly 50% of the world’s population: women. To begin, the amount of sports made available to women are just recently catching up to the number available to men. Professional parallel organizations like the WNBA and the WLS (Women’s League Soccer) weren't created until very recently— the WNBA in 1996 and the WLS in 2010. And believe it or not, but the 2012 was the first Olympics in which women were allowed to participate in every sport.

Past, the technical restrictions on women— the culture surrounding their competition is also unsettling. Women’s sports are often given a lack of credence and written off as a joke— it’s not uncommon to see a ton of remarks and posts in the same vein as this:

Furthermore, girls are dropping out of sports as they hit their teens at twice the rate of boys, and according to the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, it’s because sports are perceived as unfeminine— an unfriendly misconception to further integration and equality of the realm of physical activity. Especially when physical dominance is a cornerstone of the machoistic male figure, this only leaves more room for divisions.

All in all, I guess it’s a question of how much we’re willing to change as a society— organizations are doing their part, creating women’s groups and professional leagues, but how accepted and popular they become is up to the culture they’re competing for.