Gender Segregation In Sports

The discouragement of female participation in sport has become a cultural trope as a result of America’s history: this includes power relations where men can earn more money than women and economically exploit them, invented knowledge that the female body is naturally inferior to and more vulnerable than the male body, and the convention that sport is a space where only men belong. In March 2018, two male coaches for the Oyster River Youth Association baseball program planned to throw a ball at an 11-year-old girl’s head and make it seem like an accident (Smith, 2018). As the one female in the league, the coaches wanted to scare her out of playing so that only boys would be included in the program (Smith, 2018). Though the occurrence is …show more content…
One way this can be observed is through the misinformed first law of thermodynamics, stating that people have a finite amount of energy that is lost through fluids: connecting this to social Darwinism, or survival of the fittest, it suggests that women are the inferior sex because they lose this energy more easily as a result of menstruation (Friedman, 2018). In fact, menstruation was coined as an illness where the uterus could not hold its contents, leaving females vulnerable to accidents and infertility if they were mentally or physically stimulated (Vertinsky, 1987). As a result, women were excluded from sport with the rationalization that it was for the health and safety of themselves and their progeny. However, looking closer into this reasoning, it is obviously flawed. It is male gynecologists generating this knowledge about an organ they do not even possess with an ulterior motive of suppressing women so that men can remain in power. This is problematic because doctors are viewed as credible sources of information, giving them immense power because people willingly listen and believe what they are saying. On top of that, this understanding was extremely difficult to change, as women were frequently denied the opportunity and resources to further their education and become doctors. Another way in which science validated gender segregation was through sex testing in the Olympics during the 1960s. The International Association of Athletics Federations required female athletes to completely expose themselves in front of a medical panel to determine their eligibility to compete (Schultz, 2014). These examinations were considered scientific means of proving sex to allow for a level playing field. In reality, this completely skewed the playing field in