Gender Gap In Sports

Words: 1330
Pages: 6

Washington Mystics? New York Liberty? Can’t quite picture them can you? These are examples of female athletic teams who find it devastatingly hard to grab the attention and desire from the public. These are not the only teams, even the most “popular” teams struggle to find the matching audience their male counterparts have. The society in which sport is part of our culture and lifestyle is the very reason to why a gender-gap exists. Women have had an increased role in the world of sport ever since the effects of Title IX, which removed the exclusion for male-only sports and allowed participation in all federally financed programs (Furrow 156). This jumped started the evolutionary change in sport, as female athletes were now rapidly engaging …show more content…
There are other influencing aspects such as family situations, personal background/culture, and childhood experiences that all factor into this global nature of developing competition. The world we live in today is no longer based on the ancient concept of competitive mating in sport, even though we have similarities. As a spectator, you except a show that will fulfill your craving for the human competitive nature, and according to Deaner and Wozniak, women have not been able to satisfy these spectators limiting the range of the economic demand and desire for women in sports in today’s modern capitalist …show more content…
In today’s culture, we look up to leaders in all shapes and forms, but we tend to keep leaders from various sports very keen to our personal and societal standpoint. They affect the political, economic, and even the education system in place. The leaders arising from the culture of sport in America are most likely the dominant males of a given sport. According to Dana Massengale and Nancy Lough, women have faced a barrier in terms of holding positions at the athletic perspective. They refer to this theory in their quote “With men holding dominant roles in sport, girls often do not view athletics as a viable career path and boys do not perceive that women belong as athletic leaders” (Masengale and Lough 6) showing us the struggle women in their standpoint have faced when attempting to take on a leadership role outside the game itself. They use an example of the process of hiring coaches, and the connection to if these women can spark an aggressive competitive outroar amongst athletic performance or not. To Massengale and Lough, it’s not the lack of competitive nature within women, it’s the lack of opportunity that allows them to express this outside the field of sport that is also expanding on the limitations women’s teams face in the American sporting culture (Massengale and Lough