Gender Differences In Sports Research Paper

Professional athletics, a spectacle most people are accustomed to or at least exposed to at one point in their lives. For the most part, sporting events and popular players are advertised to consumers almost every day because of their overwhelmingly large fan base. The massive amount of sports fanatics throughout the country spell out big bucks for athletic franchises, sports teams, coaches, and players. So it is no surprise, when nearly all of us think about professional athletes, we associate the player with being wealthy, but, this is not always true. Sex matters in sports. The quantity of money an athlete earns and where he or she obtains that money from depends greatly on whether the athlete is male or female. This wage gap is common practice

For one thing, in the past women were heavily discouraged from sports or even vigorous activity because the thought that it was bad for their health. Likewise, nowadays there are numerous justifications as to why this wage gap is still occurring. “There are a multitude of reasons and excuses for the vast differences in wages — lack of interest in female sports, lack of investors, lack of advertisers, low ticket sales — and more have been used to rationalize the way our country treats and dismisses female athletes (Racine, Hope)”. However, these are all excuses. What we value is what is really stopping us from treating our female athletes as well as our male athletes. In other words, society values a man’s masculinity in the athletics realm over a woman who can prove her strength while playing a sport. This is because a woman showing her strength is in opposition to the typical gender roles set in America. Furthermore, the validations of the wage gap, which are mentioned by Hope Racine, all are an issues of publicity and advertisement. So what is happening to the female athlete’s publicity and advertisement? Well, they are not getting enough of

It is depressing that nearly no time goes towards giving these women publicity for how hard they work. Andrew Good explains the publicity times that the differently gendered leagues obtains, “In 2014, LA-based network affiliates devoted only 3.2 percent of airtime to women’s sports, down from 5 percent in 1989. SportsCenter devoted a scant 2 percent of airtime to women’s sports, a number that has remained flat since 1999. At the same time, men’s sports coverage has increased. The study found broadcasters devoted 74.5 percent of their coverage, up from 68 percent in 2009 (Good, Andrew)”. These statistics are frightening. With these statistics in mind, how can women’s athletics become mainstream if sports broadcasting networks refuse to give them the acknowledgement they deserve? After all, the public cannot support what they do not see or know is happening. There seems to be a cycle ignoring women’s teams. Women leagues play with small fan bases because there is no media coverage of them playing. Then the media attempts to justify the little to no advertisement of women’s games with the argument, “no one has an interest women’s sport leagues, just look at their fan base”. This cycle needs to be proven wrong, because there are more women participating in professional sports now than