#clearlycorinna

In my blog, I explore how gender impacts how athletes are handled in our society. Beyond gender, race and ethnicity also influence how our society views and treats athletes. While college athletics and many professional sport leagues in the US have a diverse group of athletes, the managing organizations do not reflect the same gender and racial diversity. White men hold 87.5% of athletic director positions in the Football Bowl Subdivision, a conference of colleges. The remaining positions are occupied by African Americans (7.5%), Latinos (3.3%), and white women (3.3%). Even in women’s NCAA sports, women hold only 38% of head coach positions. Ultimately, women of racial minorities are the most underrepresented group in sports. Not only do they represent a small percentage of coaching staff, but women of racial minorities also have very low participation rates. Many factors, such as social and economic status, contribute to this.

Switzer was the first woman to officially enter in the Boston Marathon. This was her response when asked why she ran the marathon. Switzer has inspired women around the world to engage in running from when she first ran the Boston Marathon in 1967 up until today. Rather than be demoralized by the oppression, Switzer was fueled and inspired by people telling her women couldn't run fast or over long distances.

recognition differences between men's and women's sports

This cartoon show how boys' athletic achievements in high school receive a disproportionally large amount of attention compared to girls. The lack of praise for female athletes in high school pushes other girls away from sports. This trend both devalues girls' achievement in sports and discourages girls from playing sports.

Growing up, my parents put me into many different sports when I was 6 years old to see which one I liked to most and was best at. Much of my childhood revolved around the sports I played, mainly swimming and soccer. Swimming is a very individual sport and competitions are almost always held for men and women at the same time, so I didn’t notice a lot of differences across genders in sports until I reached high school. In high school, what first made me angry was that the less well-known sports, such as swimming and water polo, received terrible funding, and equipment, even though our teams had great records compared to other teams. I started talking to other athletes at school and found that many girls agreed with this. They said the men’s teams got better practice times, better equipment, and always played on the better fields. In high school the disproportion between men and women’s sports was already very apparent to me, and beyond high school sports this inequality becomes even greater.

At higher athletic levels, I think co-ed leagues can be dangerous because of biological differences between men and women. The top male athletes in each sport will generally outperform the top female athletes because men are larger and stronger, but this doesn’t mean that female athletes are weak or bad at their sports. Having played in a co-ed water polo league however, I believe that at lowers levels of athletics, co-ed sports are useful to get more people playing the sport. If this league were not co-ed, there would be many women interested in playing water polo, but unable to play because their school doesn’t support a women’s team. More importantly, I think male and female sports should receive equal recognition and opportunity. 

In single gender leagues checking should be okay for both men and women. The size differences between male and women athletes makes checking between genders dangerous. Women should be allowed to check and have the same rules as males because checking in a female league is no more dangerous than checking in a men's league.

In the essay “The Braindead Megaphone”, George Saunders describes the way media functions in our high-tech, modern society. Saunders begins by comparing today’s media to an unintelligent person yelling things through a megaphone at a party. This person, like much of popular media, is ineffective in delivering stories because he blurts out his thoughts before thinking about how to express them best. Because he is the loudest voice in the room, people tend to listen to him. In 2013, women’s sports received 7% of coverage and 0.4% of the total value of commercial sponsorships. The media is showing an unbalanced amount of men’s and women’s sports, and people accept that because of their undying dependence on the media. Because the media mostly shows only men’s sports, viewers become more interested and invested in men’s sports. Then, because the public seems to prefer men’s sports to women’s, the media continues to show men’s sports. And thus, our society stays trapped in a cycle of allowing the media to dictate what the public likes.