Gender Roles Affecting Sports

Upon starting college, I was done with sports as far as participating on a team. I knew I wanted to be involved wherever I could be. I enrolled in a class titled, “Girls & Women in Sport.” The class was built upon a sociological approach. In this class, I learned the importance of sex versus gender, the role of Title IX in sports, gender roles, as well as the psychological impacts of athletic participation on women.

Continuing to brain wash the young men today with the “sports is a mans world” mentality only helps to repeat the cycle of nearly oppressing women in the industry. It keeps men feeling secure when it comes to their masculinity, yet making a woman’s fight for respect a never ending struggle.

Swoosh Michael Jordan scores a basket. The crowds in the stands, sports bars, and in their homes go wild. Swoosh, Sheryl Swoopes ( known as a female Michael Jordan) scores a basket…silence. Female athletes are very driven and work just as hard male athletes. Many females are constantly in the weight room to make sure that they have the strength to excel at their sport. If they’re having trouble in a sport, they will relentlessly work and practice at it until they get it right. They won’t give up. Society praises male athletes while female athletes tend to remain unnoticed. Women have been discriminated in sports because society has always viewed males as being more dominant in sports, there are more resources available to the men than the

Women have always been looked down on when it came to sports, women in sports don’t get a lot of attention. They aren’t seen as dominant as men when it came to sports, they would usually limit hits and the level of aggression used in a game. Men get more attention because over the years all sports have been male dominant and now that women are allowed to be involved in sports, they don’t get amount of attention they need to give the game more reputation and popularity. Sports writers have done an assessment and it came out to be that men in aggressive sports such as hockey, football, baseball, soccer, and MMA have always had the face of the sports and the face of the sport was usually a man because of the more dominant fatigue they carry. All

I mean, surely in todays world people understand that females do exercise? That the nice sheen on our bright red faces is actually sweat and not some sort of glittery substance that causes us to look amazing in that out-of-breathe sort of way? Inequality between males and females in sports is an issue old as time, and yet it still seems be prominent in our modern society. Females still have to be “one of the boys” (and apparently smell like one of the boys) to be competitive on the sports field. Frankly, I had thought that we had at least gotten past the idea that just because females don’t run on testosterone, doesn’t mean that we’re any less of an athlete in any sporting profession. But then I realized that the majority of us have, that the majority of us are not put off by women playing sport and in fact it is something that is encouraged; that many of us actually enjoy watching and rooting for the females. I realized that maybe the issue here is not the inequality between male and female, but inequality between our stereotypical

Men place themselves in the same situation when they chose to perform/participate in traditional female sports like field hockey, socially stereotyped as gay or less masculine than hockey players.

In continuation, sports culture is a male dominant environment. The athletes that are past of sports teams can be viewed as strong, masculine and talented. Thus, classing them into typical male gender roles (Aphrodite Pristess, 2014). For this section I chose to take the first athlete to come out as gay and a more recent athlete coming out to compare their experiences. In 1978 Glenn Burke became the first openly gay man in sports culture. Regardless of his baseball talents he was quickly traded to a different team (Kaplan, 2015). When Burke came out acceptance was not an option. The sports organizations and teams were uncomfortable with his sexual orientation. In an interview, Burke admitted that the team he was playing for at the time offered

How is it fair that a men's college basketball team is able to be transported on planes and dine on steak, while a women's team from the same college, travels in a van and eats fast food? It's not, but this occurs often nowadays even with laws passed preventing this type of discrimination. In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, which prohibits discrimination against girls and women in federally funded education, including athletic programs (Kiernan 3). Many schools and colleges have not been able to comply with the Title IX standards mostly because of money. Some of the problems in high schools and colleges consist of insufficient scholarships for girls, not enough coaching jobs, a lack of equipment, and a limited amount of supplies. Not only

Zimmerman’s articulation of how gender is rooted in the institutionalization of functions in society can be seen as a viable explanation of how the concept of “doing gender “ comes about in sports. This being evidenced by cases such as that of Lana lawless, a transgender athlete in the Ladies Professional Golfing Association (LPGA).Although she had a sex reassignment surgery that qualifies her both sexually and genderly as a female, the association bypassed a law that required the participants to have been “born female to compete”.A marginalizing rule for transgender athletes that forced her to take legal actions since the rule violated her civil rights in the state of California. She ultimately won against the golfing league.Its Cases like this that get to show us how sporting institutions overtime have worked to monitor the performance of gender through sanctions.

It didn’t take long for the puns to start on social media regarding Doug Weight and his head coaching debut for the New York Islanders as they prepared to take on the Dallas Stars in Brooklyn. Admittedly, I joined in the ‘fun’ leading up to faceoff and at select times throughout the game. After all, why should you have all the fun?

“In 2015, female full-time workers made only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of twenty percent” (iwpr.org). Women are getting paid less to do the exact same job as men. Females of certain ethnicity make even less. Black and Hispanic women made thirteen dollars an hour while Asian and white women made eighteen dollars an hour. Not only is there a national pay gap statistic, but the pay gap can also range according to state. For example, in Wyoming, women were paid only 64 percent of what men were paid. (Miller) This means that no matter where a woman lives and works in the United States, she will have to face this gap every day.

The problem that this article addressed is the unequal attention that men get in the media compared to women, specifically in sports. The purpose of this article was to see if men and women were getting the same amount of media attention in college basketball. This study mainly looked to the coverage that men and women college basketball got on the internet during the time of March Madness. This study also focused on the biggest sports media program with ESPN.

In addition to the gender ideology portrayed within the film, class ideology was also represented as Maggie accepted the fact she was a working-class individual (Gilbert, Summer 2015a). As Scrap, the caretaker of Frankie’s gym stated, “she knew she was trash” (Eastwood, 2004). In this particular scene, Maggie was taking the leftovers from a customer’s plate from the restaurant she worked at, so that she had something to eat that evening for dinner. Although Maggie accepted the fact she was a working-class individual, she wanted to avoid the working-class life and thought her athletic abilities in boxing would allow for social mobility (Gilbert, Summer 2015d). As sport is a representation of social class (Gilbert, Summer 2015d), it can be assumed

Women’s participation in sport has historically not been given the same coverage, funding, prize money, sponsorship or respect as men’s.

Males mainly participate in sports that are considered more “masculine” and that often include the characteristics of danger, risk, violence, speed, strength, endurance, and challenge (Klomsten, Marsh, & Skaalik, 2005). Females usually participate in sports that are characteristically graceful, non-aggressive, and beautiful (Klomsten et al., 2005). Even male sports that have a female counterpart are often very different characteristically, like baseball and softball, for example.