Equality In Sports

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Gender Equality: The Push to Make Women Dominate in Sports

One vast issues right now is gender equality in sports. In the sports world we have made an increase in allowing girls and women take part in sports, but we need to make it more equal and fair. By putting more awareness out there for women, sports will hopefully become more equal. There are many aspects in sports that can be looked at when comparing women to men or boys to girls in how athletes are trained and treated among all ages. Women in the sports industry are making the push to get the recognition that deserve compared to men. Female athletes are being assertive in their movement to make change for the future to come. This paper will focus on brief history of women in sports …show more content…

Womens first huge step to break barriers happened in 1972 with the passing of the Title IX. After the passing of Title IX that large step became a slower process than women hoped for. At first Title IX was not what it was first thought to be, “the law, though general in its language drew attention to systematic gender inequality in educational policies in general, which later came to include disparities in the educational sports programs. Although the law applied to educational institutions receiving federal funding, Title IX has defined educational standards for fairness.” (McDonagh and Pappano 28). Even though this being the first step girls and women to get fairness with there education, it was not till later with the law that women were able to get the fairness with sports. Title IX did bring change in numbers for high school girls taking part in sports, “in 1971, only 294,000 U.S. high school girls played interscholastic sports, compared with 3.7 million boys. By 2005, the participation gap had narrowed: 4.1 million boys and 2.9 million girls now play interscholastic sports.” (Messner 2). The passing of Title IX has a …show more content…

The question can be asked why are men sports so much more popular than women sports? When people think of sports, people mostly think of things like the MLB, NFL, NHL, and MBA. But people do not think of leagues like National Professional Fastpitch, the WNBA, and the Nation Women Soccer League. Women have their own leagues but nowhere compare to the pay or anything else. In the MLB the average salary can be $545,000 (ESPN). With that being the average salary for a player that is new to the team or just starting out in the MLB. Looking at the average pay for player in the National Professional Fastpitch League “teams in the NPF must squeeze rosters of at least 18 players within a salary cap of $150,000. Few players earn more than $20,000. Most make low-to-mid four figures for the three-month season.” (Hays). Numbers like these shows little room that the NPF must work with to make a team compared to the MLB were players make more than the salary cap of the NPF. For the WBNA the gap is almost the same, Forbes looked at the revenue that the league pays to their players, “the NBA pays its players about fifty percent of the leagues revenue. It appears, when we look at what we know about WNBA revenue and salaries, that the league’s players are receiving less than twenty-five percent of the revenue. And that percentage

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