Gender Inequality In Basketball

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Gender inequality in the United States is a serious problem, and it is often overlooked. It is a big issue, especially within sports. We live in a society where our culture prefers men 's sports over women 's. Labeling activities as feminine and masculine is a social construction based on stereotyped expectations regarding gender and perceived gender differences (McCullick, 2012). In 1972 Title IX was passed stating that, no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. This opened up athletics to women and girls (Education Amendment Act of 1972, 1972). Although …show more content…

When starting off, rookies who get drafted into the NBA start off making $412,718+, whereas in 2016 the rookie players in the WNBA only start off with $39,676 (Basketball Tips), this is the same pay that teachers receive. With receiving this low amount of pay, the women in the WNBA often have to get side jobs in order to pay their bills. The majority of them have to coach during the off-season. Female athletes struggle much more than men athletes do. They always have to cobble together money so they can pursue their dreams, whereas men, on the other hand, are signing $100 million contracts (Rummell, 2014).In this society nowadays it may not come as a surprise because we live in a society where women make 77 cents to a man 's dollar. If you thought that the rookie salaries were bad enough between the WNBA and the NBA, you were sadly mistaken because it gets worse later on in their …show more content…

Way more television sources support and cover the NBA than they do the WNBA. With the money that the NBA gets paid just so these sports reporters can run their stories, they can afford to pay their players more. The WNBA only gets covered by ABC, ESPN2, NBA TV, Lifetime, Oxygen, and NBC, and these stations only run their stories for about 5 minutes where to the NBA they talk about them for hours. When the games are going on you can only view the WNBA regular season games on ESPN, and NBA TV and their finals on ABC (McCullick, 2012), where you can view the NBA regular season games on ESPN, ABC, CBS, NBC, TNT, TBS, and NBA TV (NBA). Even if we could get more sponsors to support the WNBA and more support from the minority community since they are the ones who show the most interest in basketball maybe these women could get a raise in their checks and would not have to have side jobs on the side to live, when their dreams and hard work is not paying them what they deserve to get paid. Half of these women on the court can play basketball just as well as the majority of the men on the court, the only difference that they may have is that the men are more capable of dunking than the women but that does not mean that women cannot do it, because WNBA 's own Candace Parker as known as the female Kevin Durant has proved to everyone that a women can dunk a basketball on multiple occasions during a

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