Women In sports
For my second curiosity project, I will be focusing on women in sports. This is a topic that I have always found to be under-looked. I have played many sports throughout my lifetime, so this subject is something I find interesting.
Women in sports are paid much less than men, this is often because sports played by males often get more media coverage than female sports. Women make up 40% of the participants in sports, however, only about 4.7% of all sports coverage is on women’s sports, while the other 95% is focused solely on the men. I often wonder why this is? Why do men get more attention when it comes to sports? I read that since women’s sports teams don’t get enough media coverage, it leads to the loss of sponsors, money, and fanbases. Another disadvantage in women’s sports would be the commentators. Often commentators will mention the athletes role as a mother or a woman, before mentioning her role as an athlete. However, when talking about a male athlete, this sort of information is seldom brought up. After watching a women’s soccer game, and a men’s soccer game, it was almost immediate to my ears how much more boring the commentators made the women’s game sound. They used exciting words and loud voices in the men’s game, yet quiet and simple statements in the women’s game. This only adds to the many reasons women get less coverage in sports than their male counterparts.
Due to these sad circumstances of less coverage, women get paid far less than men do in highly competitive sports. In this paragraph, I am going to focus on the pay gap between women’s hockey and men’s hockey. After doing some research I found that women who play in the NWHL make a shocking minimum of $5,000, and a low maximum of $7,000. While Men who play in the NHL make a large minimum of $650,000 and a very high maximum of $15.9 million. With numbers like these, it is almost impossible to ignore the gender inequality, yet it is still widely unrecognized because this is considered an athletic normal. Many people argue that the unfair pay range has to do with men’s hockey just being more exciting to watch, it is more physical and more aggressive, and I don’t particularly disagree with them. Yes, men’s hockey is a more physical sport, it was designed to be that way, but just because women can’t be too physical does not mean it is not as exciting to watch. Women’s hockey is equally as entertaining, just in a different way, women’s hockey has more to do with the technical way of playing.
https://globalnews.ca/news/5103939/wage-gap-continues-to-affect-sports-world-female-sports-expert/
https://thevarsity.ca/2019/01/27/sexism-in-sports-media-coverage/
https://www.queensjournal.ca/story/2019-04-03/opinions/athletics-is-still-a-mans-world/
