article women n sport
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INTRODUCTION
Women have been fighting for equality all throughout history. In sport, specifically, women were once not even permitted to watch the Olympic Games (11). After finally being permitted to participate in sports, women had to undergo gender testing to make sure they were not men trying to cheat the system (62). Furthermore, the coverage of women’s sports did not supersede coverage of dogs and horses until 1992 (42). To this day, female athletes still experience significantly less and different media coverage than their male counterparts. The purpose of this study is to examine how increasing exposure to women’s sports impacts attitudes towards women’s sports.
Improvements in Gender Equality in Sports
Although women have faced many challenges throughout history, they have come closer and closer to achieving gender equality and those advances cannot be ignored. The US Congress passed Title IX of the Omnibus Education Act of 1972, for example, mandated equal federal funding opportunities towards male and female students in higher education (38), which encouraged more girls and women to participate in sports. This increased accessibility to sports sparked a change of less than 32,000 intercollegiate women and 300,000 high school girls that participated in sports prior to ‘Title IX’ to 200,000 intercollegiate women and three million girls that participated in sports in 2010 (34).
It is important to keep women and girls participating in sports and exercise because sports have many benefits for men and women regardless of gender including decreased social loafing later in life with a history of participating in team, rather than individual sports (16); improved respiratory and cardiovascular health (58); enhanced muscle and bone strength and reduced hip fractures, vertebrae fractures, and cancer diagnoses (2, 66); reduced risk of Type II diabetes (22); decreased risk of depression (39); improved grades (51); and in children who participate in team sports, increased self-concept and self-esteem (55).
Gender Inequality in Sports Still Exists
Despite the improvements towards reaching gender equality in sports, female athletes still face numerous obstacles. The media, for example, present sports as if there are masculine (e.g., football and ice hockey) and feminine (e.g., gymnastics and figure skating) sports, aligning with traditional expectations of male and female athletes (36, 44), which makes it more difficult to break traditional gender barriers and allowing women to participate in masculine sports and men to participate in feminine sports. In fact, many female athletes are only accepted by society and receive coverage in the media if they participate in traditionally feminine sports (12). If a woman dares to participate in a masculine sport, their sexuality is immediately questioned (7). The media tends to ignore, which devalues, women’s athletic accomplishments by focusing on their physical appearance (60), private lives (4, 29, 31), and femininity and sexuality even if they achieve more impressive athletic feats (21).
This unequal attention may seem minimal to some, but is discrimination nonetheless. Even if women and girls do not interpret the inequality as discrimination, it can still cause negative consequences because then any kind of negative outcome (i.e., lower ticket sales compared to male athletes) can be internally attributed (i.e., self-blame) which will result in reductions in motivation, self-esteem, and future expectations for achievement .
Media Exposure of Women’s Sports
Gender inequality, as noted, has many negative consequences for female athletes. In addition to the unequal type of coverage that female athletes receive, they also receive less overall coverage (8, 19, 30, 47, 56). Women’s sports are also perceived as less exciting and slower than men’s sports (40). In that same study, participants reported that they had minimal experience with women’s sports and only watched women’s sports if that is what was on television. The media, though, does not give women’s sports much coverage, minimizing the frequency of which sports fans view women’s sports. In fact, less than 10% of sports media covers women’s sports and less than 2% of sports media covers women’s sports that are deemed masculine (37). Unfortunately, news staff are less likely to recognize this difference than viewers (41), meaning that news staff may not realize that they are arguably discriminating against female athletes.