Gender Inequality In Sports

Words: 2825
Pages: 12

Women have and continue to face many setbacks while playing sports, but with those setbacks comes positives. From learning that they have to look a certain way to getting paid seventy times less than their male counterparts, women face endless inequality in sports. One great example of how society is teaching women to think about their looks before their talent is Mo’ne Davis. Mo’ne had made the cover of Sports Illustrated, and she was discussing what she thought of it with a filmmaker. Mo’ne’s first comment is “Just to, like, see my face on here is pretty cool, but not the face that I’m making…”. The filmmaker interrupts Mo’ne asking, “You don’t like your face on the cover?” Mo’ne responded saying, “I mean I look like a blowfish, but otherwise …show more content…
Women also have to face the discrimination shown by their salaries. The average salary for a WNBA player is $72,000. The average salary for a NBA player is 5 million dollars. That is about seventy times bigger than a WNBA player’s salary (Wallace). The women’s national soccer team also face this kind of discrimination. The women’s team made two million dollars for winning the World Cup. The US men’s soccer team lost in the first round of the World Cup, but they received eight million dollars (Bainbridge). Although some might be convinced that there are a lot of negative setbacks, the positives of women playing sports clearly outweigh the costs.
Title IX has had a huge impact on women and their participation in sports. Title IX is a law that no person can be discriminated against based on their gender in any educational program or activity, which includes sports. Title IX has created many positives for women. The first positive is equal access to higher education. Before Title IX was created, universities chose to refuse to admit women, which was legal at that time. Now, more women are enrolled in college than men,and women are going into careers that were originally made for men. Also, universities can no longer only train women for the jobs they approved of for women.
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The first major negative is the loss of women coaches. The number of female coaches has declined after Title IX, even though tons of jobs were created. The reason for this is that when women’s sports gained speed and funding, the coaching jobs became more attractive to men. Having male coaches have created many worries and incidents of sexual abuse. Ever since 1999, 36 US national swim team male coaches have been banned or have resigned from the sport because of the accusations of sexual misconduct (Flanagan). One example of this is the is the USA Gymnastics coach Don Peters. Two of his four gymnasts reported having sexual intercourse with him which caused him to be “permanently ineligible for membership”. Female athletes have expressed concern that they receive more criticism from their male coach than their male teammates. These athletes feel as though male coaches do not understand that there is a diversity of female body types. Their male coaches are telling these women that they have to look a certain way and to meet a certain weight in order to compete in an event (Kessel). Title IX has also caused issues when it comes to school’s budgets. Before Title IX was created, many schools didn’t have have the facilities for women’s sports to be played in. After the law was created, universities and schools had to pull money from other important areas of their budget to help things come together. Some schools