Equality In Sports

Have you ever wonder when you turn on your TV to watch a couple of random sports news but somehow those channels always talking and bringing up only professional male athletes? Even when you sitting on the chair to chill or driving on the highway, you will be less likely to hear about any women's sporting events covered on radio channels. It looks like women are still being oppressed when it comes to physical activities. Women often times get little recognition from the media, receive less funding from the Government, and for sure a lot less respect compared to men who doing the same job. However, that doesn't stop female athletes from working hard in order to earn little achievements one by one hopefully someday equality will be made. For

The traditional view of womanhood by our society, unfortunately, doesn't coincide with sports. When we were young, our parents usually taught us that boys have to be strong and brave while girls should never behave aggressively or show attitude. There are certain aspects of sports which conventionally valued in male, for instance, aggression, muscle, competitiveness, strength. According to Margaret Duncan (2009), women are educated to value traits that aren't match up with what the world of sports actually expect athletes to do, such as being weak, nice, vulnerable and passive. After years of fighting for gender equality in order to break down the wall of sexism, even the best female athletes are practically left out by the media. Duncan (2009) once addresses that some of the increased coverage in media nowadays is caused by sexualisation, not their sporting skills itself. If you think that is already ugly enough, you sure have not seen when the media covers female athletes as sexual objects or simply they just want to compare them to men. Sadly, negative things like this still exist in the 21st century and awfully affect the image of female athletes in popular media (Duncan,

Unfortunately, women are only accounted for 4% of the sports news in 2009. ESPN, a world famous sports channel, usually only showed the females info around 3.6% of the time at the bottom corner of a TV screen. Not only you can count the number of hours the media spent to cover women's sports with one hand, but also that numbers seem to be dropping. We said we've achieved gender equality, but things don't look like it at all. We accidentally give a lot of little girls the feeling that they are inadequate, that they are not important or will not be valued like men if they choose sports to be their future career. These statistics are hurting all women who risk their body every day, who do whatever it takes with sweat and blood to play a sport for the pride and the entertainment of our country. By not rewarding them what they deserve, we are letting our female professional athletes down big