YO, IS THIS SEXISM?
Kine Myhrer Fløtre
November 20, 2021
Since the beginning of sports, women has been undermined, mistreated, excluded, and discriminated. Men has looked at women doing sports as if they are ten times better, they keep telling us that we belong the kitchen, that we should stay at home and take care of the family and all the chauvinist things they can come up with. In this paper I am going to talk about the systemic injustice we as women has faced since the beginning of sports, touch on how it has changed throughout the history, and the female advocates that has paved the way before us, and the ones who are standing in front, fighting until this day.
The sport we practice today are mainly created by and for men, some examples are that men competed in the ancient Olympic games, men fought in the gladiator fights in Rome, and it is men who were behind the creation and ideas of the modern sports we know and practice today.
Not only have women been fighting for equal wages, they have had to fight for the right to even participate and enter the field. In ancient Greece, women could only participate in some foot races and equestrian events, but they were not allowed to engage in any other Olympic events. Although it was strict in Greece, it was better for the Spartan, Native American, and indigenous women, they were all believed to have participated in the same events and sports as the men did. After years and decades passing, women began being denied. Only men participated in the first Olympics. In the second Olympic games, 1066 athletes participated, only 12 of them were females competing in golf and tennis. The year after, only 6 women were allowed to compete. Now who do you think were in charge on deciding whether or not women could compete in the Olympics? You´re right, it was men. They looked at different sports and evaluated them based on their “feminism”, if they considered a sport a “feminine sport”, they allowed women to participate and called it a women´s sport event. Examples of feminine sport was tennis, equestrian, and golf. In the Victorian age and women were denied to partake in most sports. The reason for this was people being completely unaware and uneducated about women and women´s bodies. They believed that participation in sports could harm their reproductive organs, and make their offspring weaker because women, opposite to men, apparently has a finite amount of energy in their bodies.
In the 1922 Olympic games in Paris women were allowed participation and to compete in more physically demanding games like track and field, one requirement though was that they couldn’t get out of breath so running further than 200 yards was disallowed. My question here is, why would women being out of breath be a problem? It´s 1922, how are they so uneducated on the female body? It makes me think that it´s just a bad excuse for not letting them compete in a more physical demanding way because they don´t want the women to be “masculine”, they want the women to be ideal in their eyes, which did not include being muscular and masculine. The first professional sports league for women was founded in the 1940s and it happened because the men was deployed to fight in World War II, the abandoned wives was left and they started the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. After the start of this league we finally saw more women competing in sports, it was an increased interest and participation, especially at the Olympics. And thanks to the Title IX of the Education Act in 1972, women were allowed equal opportunity in education and sports. Emphasis on opportunity though, because equal opportunity is not the same as equal rights, they were still discriminated, hated on, and could only dream about getting equal pay. So although this was a huge step in the right direction, there was still a long way to go and even until this day, we´re still fighting.
The biggest eye-catching factor of inequality us female are facing in sports in the money we earn. There´s only a handful of sports where women earn the same amount of money as their male counterparts. In a survey conducted by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation with various Norwegian athletes there´s huge wage differences between the two genders in the same sports. Between the men and women, the difference is around 100 million NOK which translates to around $11 000 000. Not only are the wages unequal, the prize pool in the same sports between men and women are the same. In a golf tournament held in 2017 the male winner would get about 2.5 million Euros while the women would only receive 450,000 Euros for the same win. But there are exceptions, In the same year the Norwegian Cross country skier Heidi Weng cashed in $730 800, while her male colleagues earned about $100 000 less than her. Another exception is Tennis where the men and women would get the same prize money in a tournament such as Wimbledon.
Now the question you may be asking yourself is why does women earn such a significant amount less money than men? Well, the reason is actually quite simple. It´s because of revenue. Women´s sport has a lower entertainment value because men keeps comparing it to themselves, men can throw harder, run faster, and are stronger, but men and women don´t have same physical attributes because of genetics, so it´s not really comparable. But as a result of this, women sports attracts fewer viewers which again leads to media giving men more space because it provides a greater commercial value. Another result of this is that women gets fewer sponsor opportunities, less commercials and advertisement, and less media time, which because of revenue means less money. Although the pay gap can be explained, it is too big and significant to justify. It has now become a trend to even out the difference and because of former women paving the way we now have strong, vocal, female leaders making sure we are being heard and working on closing the gap between the men´s and women´s money differences.
I also think it´s very interesting that as soon as a female participate in a sport that´s male dominated their sexuality is immediately questioned. Because of gender roles and norms people make these assumptions, gender roles and norms shape our identity in a way that they shape our perceptions of ourselves in addition to others and it changes the demands and expectations of sports. The media plays a role here because they have a tendency to portray women different to men, men are being called strong and powerful, while women are elegant, sexy and sometimes referred to as “girls”. Another thing the media does that plays a role here is that they in some ways degrade female´s accomplishments by having a focus on their personal life, their appearance, sexuality and other things that doesn´t have anything to do with their athletic performance and abilities.
Some of the women who´s been paving the way for today´s female athletes rights are Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, Simone Biles and Megan Rapinoe. Megan Rapinoe might be the front figure of Women´s soccer and she took the lead when the US Women´s National team in soccer started their fight for equal rights. USWNT has for years been performing a lot better than the men´s national team for decades, they´ve won more tournaments, bigger tournaments, and more games. In addition to better performance, they´ve actually brought in more revenue from games than the men´s team did. But the sad part is that even though they generated more money, their income was way lower. And that makes no sense to me, and it shouldn´t make sense to you either considering the point I made earlier about women not gaining the same public attraction as men, but in this case they are, but they´re still not making the money they deserve. That year they generated $20 million more than the men, but they were only paid a quarter of what the men did. The women´s team are not marketed nor promoted nearly as much as the men are, which of course leads to lower attendances and merchandise sale. So it´s actually kind of funny that they brought in more revenue, because that means a lot more people would watch their games than the men´s game even though it wasn´t promoted and advertised as the men´s games are. The women´s team and Megan Rapinoe is paving the way for young athletes from all over the world because of how they are standing up for women´s right in not only soccer, but sports in general.
Women are finally starting to get the same attraction from the public eye and people are putting in more money to support women´s team and individual athletes from all over the world. We are seeing a big change, both men and women are standing up for equal rights, equal pay and closing the big gap between men and women. Now we need to keep up the fight, because there´s still inequality we need to make an end to, and I believe we are getting closer. As a young female athlete, I can feel the change, and I am so deeply grateful for the people who has been fighting for years and risked their jobs and lives for us, and I will do my very best to not let them down and keep fighting for the generations coming after me.
Sources
https://www.juntendo.ac.jp/athletes/en/history/
https://www.nrk.no/logginn/oauth2/authorization/nrk-innlogging?autoLogin=true