Gender Discrimination Against Women In Sports

Women in Sports Even though women have gained wide acceptance in the workplace and politics as an equal with men, the field in sports journalism and women’s athletics lacks modern gender equality due to gender discrimination against women. This essay explores the many issues women in sports faces today. Before the 1960s, women in the sports department were rarely seen in the world because sports writing has always been a male-dominated profession. The idea of a women writing about sports was unnatural. When Title IX was put into action in the 1970s, this event opened doors to many women athletes and, as a result more female reporters were reporting on minor sports events. Later on, women began covering major sports events such as professional …show more content…
Women who attempt to get an interview have what they called an unwritten rule that they may not enter, and that this rule hinders the female reporters from writing their articles. In late 1970s, some media such as newspapers were proposing to the teams to let anybody, regardless of gender, enter the men’s locker room. This proposal was denied by the commissioner of the Major League Baseball (MLB). According to Melissa Ludtke, a reporter from Time Magazine, the access to the New York Yankees’ locker room was denied by the Commissioner of the MLB, Bowie Kuhn, in 1977. When Bowie stated, “To permit members of the opposite sex into this place of privacy…would undermine the dignity of the game.” (Fornoff, 1993) Later, a new commissioner of the MLB, made a rule that anybody would have access to the men’s locker room, but with this new rule, for the female reporters, this was just the beginning of a new threat. There are many cases where female sports reporters faced some kind of assault when they entered in the men’s locker room. Some were physically assaulted, sexually abused, or challenged by the players in a sexually inappropriate way. Some women sports reporters need to tolerate intimidating professional players while being in the locker room. Some players were nude the whole time a women reporter was in …show more content…
Girls and women who shine in sports are being called “lesbians” and are being denied equal opportunity in some community sports programs because it is a threat to the traditional system of a men’s and women’s sports. Many women athletes who are lesbian hesitate to let the public know of their gender preference due to the fear that later they would be discriminated against by the public and by sports organizations. Some colleges won’t recruit women athletes and recruiters tell the athletes to go to another sports program or educational institute. Women are regularly banned from many types of sports. Not too long ago, there wasn’t a women’s soccer league, but now there is one in the United States which was founded in 2012. Unfortunately, profits in women sports are not high, resulting in lower wages for the players. As The Women’s Sports Foundation stated on their web page, “Although Title IX has brought women the opportunity of fair play with the men, not all is equal as it should be. For every dollar spent on college for female athletes, two dollars are spent on male athletes.” Basically the Women’s Sports Foundation is saying that the money is not being spent equally on women’s sports as it should be. Even now, some high schools in the United States don’t have equal funding for women’s athletics as it should be. In research that was conducted by the Women Sports Foundation,