Summary: Girls On The Team

While watching the class videos “Girls on the Team” (10/27/17) and “Skirting the Issue” (10/30/17), I discovered examples of gender discrimination. Discrimination is an action or behavior that treats a person unequally because of their membership in a group (McIntyre 2011). Gender is culturally defined expectations about attributes and behaviors of males and females (McIntyre 2011). The videos “Girls on the Team” and “Skirting the Issue” display gender discrimination by using judgment of dominant and minority groups, stereotypes, and the ‘fag discourse’.
The videos “Girls on the Team” and “Skirting the Issue” identify how context matters in terms of dominant and minority groups. The status, position held in the social class, of gender is dichotomized into two groups: the dominant or norm and the minority or other. In “Girls on the Team”, a group of young women chose to join their high school wrestling team. In this case, the male dominated sport of …show more content…
In “Girls on the Team”, people were afraid the young women would be hurt in wrestling males. Particularly, the young women’s fathers were concerned. They saw women as frail and weak, a stigma attached to the female gender. A stigma is a negatively defined characteristic that goes with membership in a minority group. In “Skirting the Issue”, Barry was stereotyped as being aggressive and dangerous. Many outsiders were concerned for the safety of his opponents and members of his own team, however, the team coach reported they have not experienced any injuries since Barry joined. Parents of his own teammates used individualized discrimination, negative treatment of one person by another based on their membership in a group, against Barry by not clapping for him and advocating for his removal from the team (McIntyre