PROBLEM: INEQUALITY IN SPORTS

SOLUTION: GET TO THE ROOT

Written by: Shawn Monaghan
for Professor Glass in course 32.236
October 16th,1995

More of public money is given to male than female sports at least at the high end of the scale (ie.
in professional and near professional level sports). Landsdowne park was built and maintained i
on public funds and it currently is used disproportionately by male teams over female teams .
Money funding sportii teams at Carleton University goes disproportionately to male teams such as
the Carleton Ravens . The above situations are symptoms of discrimination of which an
egalitarian and progressive society should clearly not be proud.
It could however be argued that the reason women's sports receive less funding is due to less
actual need or interest. The argument might proceed much like this: Women have less interest in
sports naturally and are less physically capable and should therefore have less sport funding.
Otherwise, a few athletic women would benefit disproportionately to the great number of athletic
men. This argument leaves out a very fundamental factor of society that must not be ignored --
socialization.
Women have been socialized to be pretty and 'feminine' for countless generations and it has
come to the point at which it is virtually impossible to know for sure whether women are born
and bred or trained and seen to be 'weaker' and less athletic than men. Given the ubiquitous and
covert nature of socialization it is arguably impossible to distinguish its effect on us from
genetics. This causes a great many problems when describing the 'nature' of men and women in
such a complex social network as exists today. For example the statement; women are physically
the weaker sex. This seems rather a reasonable statement in a male dominated society where
strength is measured by how many pounds you can lift in the gym, but perhaps in a female
dominated society strength would have been measured by endurance of pain in childbearing.
Surely to this scale men would be the weaker sex by far. Of course, this would not be fair to men
for they do not bear children, it is biologically impossible, but is today's standard ofiiistrength any
more fair to women in ignoring the strength and endurance required of giving birth . Perhaps in
an egalitarian society we would see or define strength through both the virile male athlete and the
vigorous mother.
To return to the gist of the above argument: If we are to give less funding to women in sports due
to their lack of athleticism perhaps it would be best that we demonstrated that women are truly
uninterested and incapable first. This means giving women at the very least an equal chance to
develop their physical interests and capabilities. It could be argued that women should have even
greater funding than men to develop their athletic potential as women have to first overcome
societal pressures against being athletic. Not only do women have to combat the feminine mystic
that they
iv
are weaker than men but they must also overcome societal pressures of the ideal
woman .
The rise of, or perhaps more appropriately the discovery of the existence of, bulimia and
anorexia in women of all ages is evidence to many that women are succumbing to the pressures
of 'the beauty myth'. Everyday the newsstands and the television sets inundate women with the
images of very thin very tall supposedly sexy superstars, not to mention the ubiquitous message -
- dieting is the only way for a woman to be healthy and sexy.
You can not go through a single grocery store line without seeing yet another of those fad diets
plastered all over the tabloids and magazines. It is no wonder that statisticians are noticing an
increasing tendency in young women to diet right around the time of puberty. I had not noticed v
this myself when I was young, but some of my friends have told me that they have felt the urge
to go on a diet ever since they broke the magical 100 lb mark.
If women are, at an ever decreasing age, compelled by society to take on a diet of starvation and
near starvation levels we should not be in the least bit surprised to find them weaker than men,
nor indeed should we be surprised to find them less mentally solvent. If a man wants to lose fat
he will deal with the perceived problem by first increasing physical activity and then cutting out
extraneous food consumption, rarely will he even consider taking such obscenely unhealthy diets
of which many women partake on a regular basis. Unfortunately for the woman she is not quite
so free to chose such a 'manly' lifestyle.
Clearly the situation for women in sports is not equal to that of men. Some sporting events that
receive television and radio broadcasting during prime-time include; football, baseball, hockey,
tennis, golf and the Olympics. The first three of these are completely male dominated with very
few if any female athletes reaching professional stature. The last three sport events all have a
female contingent, which arguably is slowly but surely reaching the stature of equality with the
male contingent.
The reason for the above modern situation seems clear, disproportionate funding for 'male' sports
and socialization that relegates and confines women to the role of spectator or substandard
athlete.
As I hope has been demonstrated above, this role women have been riveted into by societal
pressures is by no means necessarily a demonstration of their true limitations but merely the
product of many generations of male domination. Male domination means that the men have had
the power to control the lives of woman and to define her role in society.
Affirmative action then must be a means to allow women to redefine her role in society on her
terms. This means she should be free to explore parts of herself heretofore either undiscovered or
denied. Perhaps it is the feminist athlete's dream to become the best (person not woman) in her
sport of choice. Perhaps, but why should she stop there, it would seem that there is the possibility
of a huge variety of activities that could test the mettle of the athlete. Why should the female
athlete be interested in football, baseball, marathons, golf, etcetera these sports were all devised
by men for men.
I am certainly not suggesting that 'male' sports are notvi
good enough for women. I am suggesting
however that women might devise sports for women of a different nature than those which were
devised by men for men in a society dominated by men and male values. It does not seem
necessary that there must be a single winner or winning team while all the rest are losers. Nor
does it seem necessary that competition be at the centre of sports and not cooperation, for
example.
Certainly as a product of our patriarchal society I find it difficult to imagine how we could have a
sporting event that is not competitive at its heart, but this is no argument that such a non-
competitive sporting event could not exist. Our modern sporting events are handed down to us by
a long tradition of man to son and competition appears to be at the heart of all of them. If we can
stop and consider that even in the sporting events in which women have achieved professional
status it appears as only token, the female athlete or team that is the champion is merely the
'female' champion.
If women are given the benefit of affirmatively active procedures that focus on redressing
women the result should be a drastically less stratified society. This means women and men
would have roughly equal ranges of pay as professionals and roughly equal funding at all levels,
also a roughly equal percentage of both men and women might also become involved in sports in
general as well as at the professional level.
At present women are not as a group participating in sports in the same proportion as men, thus it
appears quite likely that women will eventually catch up with men with regards to speed, agility
and many other physical attributes of importance to sports. Men do however, appear to have
physical superiority to women in upper body strength such that it would be impossible for men
and women to compete on an equal basis in sports that require upper body strength. Tennis for
example is a very demanding physical sport that favours the male biology over the female.
Perhaps as women become more involved in sports as a group we will find that they have the
biological advantage in other types of sports (perhaps even sports which have not yet been
invented).
Fundamentally this means that I believe that women and men are roughly equal when compared
as a group in agility and speed, and that perhaps the reason women appear less fast and agile than
men is that a number of exceptional individuals have been dissuaded from using their talents
because they have been socialized not to be athletic.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a fundamental barrier to physical equality between men and
women. Any attempt to generate gender equality in sports must deal with this biological
argument. In the same spirit it should be said that any attempt to desegregate sports would have
to also deal with the argument from biology. Perhaps it can be argued that women should not be
prevented from trying-out for professional teams just because women as a group have less upper-
body strength than men as a group. Given, that the strongest woman is a good deal stronger than
the weakest man how can one justify allowing every single manviito try out for professional teams
while at the same time disallowing any woman from trying out ? Unfortunately, even in the
desegregation of sports we can not get away from the fact that many more men will be on the
team than women -- due merely to our biology differences. If our understanding of the biological
differences between men and women are correct it seems impossible that desegregation of sports
could provide even a semblance of gender parity. Furthermore, if women are allowed to try out
for men's teams, will women's teams be then required to allow men in? If so, then the
desegregation would do much to reverse any attempts for gender parity in sports.
The above argument may appear at first rather convincing but there are a number of major
complications and over-simplifications. What if any female teams would men be interested in
trying out for? The High school women's basketballviiiteam, perhaps? Women do not have
professional football, basketball, or baseball teams , so it does not seem possible that they could
lose by the above reciprocity argument. True, men would outnumber women on professional
teams by quite a large proportion but this would go a good deal toward gender parity and not
away from it as the number of women on such teams now are zero.
Perhaps the best method of attaining gender-parity would be to encourage female professional
teams in football, baseball and hockey. Unfortunately it does not appear likely that these 'female'
versions of 'real' teams would do anything at all for women or gender parity. Intuitively, it does
not appear that the public would have much interest in a 'weaker' professional league made up of
women.
However, consider the air time given to the story of Monica Seles, who had a comeback in
Tennis after being attacked by a fan of one of her opponents, as an example of how the female
contingent of sports is becoming interesting and could be very marketable to the public. The
potential for the female athletes to become as popular as male athletes is illustrated by the
amount of air time given to the Monica Seles story as well as by the amount of enthusiasm
required in a population to generate a fanatic assassin who is willing to maim someone, just to
see their favourite female athlete win.
Given the Monica Seles success story as a model of the female contingent of Tennis, it seems
possible that a similar female contingent of other types of sports could arise within the
foreseeable future. What we are obliged to do in the light of an egalitarian society is to help
engage and speed up this process that may already be underway. We should not debate the
possibility of popular female professional teams and athletes, but be as optimistic as possible in
allowing the possible to become real.
Perhaps one day legislation could be enforced guaranteeing gender parity in sports broadcasting
on major television and radio networks. Some might argue that this type of legislation would
unduly hamper the profits of the advertising dependent networks, but the Monica Seles story
seems clear evidence that people want to see female athletes and are willing, nay eager to
participate as consumers of female sports. Any loss to networks would surely be recouped in
short order by increased segments of the population participating in the consumption of gendered
sport events. Segments of the population that have until the present ignored sporting events may
find a new interest and pastime in watching female teams.
Consider the argument that women as individuals and athletes might suffer from the status of
being only the best "female" athlete or the best "female" team in a segregated sport regime. If the
only viable alternative is to have desegregated sport teams and desegregated competitions:
Women would likely lose out in being under-represented on the teams and within the winners
circles of many sports -- it does not seem likely that women will ever completely match the
biologically determined strength of men. Perhaps being the best female athlete or the best female
team is the best women can expect to achieve so long as our society focuses on the male-
invented games of the present.
Given time and money women athletes may eventually surpass or equal male athletes in some
sports that do not require masculine upper body strength, but until such a time we must
concentrate on equality of opportunity without allowing questions of equal success to bog ix
down
the apparatus of equal access. As for the sports that prove to require upper-body brawn for
success, it does not appear that women can ever hope to achieve equality of competition with
men, short of genetic engineering. What this should say to women is not that they are lesser than
men, but that they are different. The only non-genetic solution would appear to be that which
some feminists put forward, whereby the first step toward equality is to liberate women from the
male-dominated scale of values.
Perhaps the type of sport devised in a basically egalitarian society
x
would take on a slightly
different character as provided by the Radical feminist approach . Cooperation might take
precedent over competition. Instead of having two cooperative teams competing with one
another with the end result of one winner and one loser, we could have a sport that involves a test
of personal best the ultimate goal being for everyone to beat their own personal best at some
physical and/or intellectual cooperative pursuit. The details are not of importance here, who
could possibly tell what could result in a radical society of true egalitarianism. Perhaps the nature
of future sports would be some sort of Hegelian synthesis between the male thesis of competition
and the female antithesis of cooperation the end result being any of a large number of heretofore
unimagined possibilities.
Fundamentally the hope that Radical feminism can bring to the world of sports might be true
equality. Not just the equal treatment of women to compete in a male-dominated and male-
defined world, but forxi women to be allowed to define themselves and to redefine sports as well
as society as a whole .
There are major problem with this vision of a gender equal society devising its own form of
gender equal sports. Most of these are of a practical nature. The answer appears to be of a great
and varied nature: education, affirmative action, and increased awareness of gender issues.

The barriers that socialization place on women and their potential futures are also immense and
varied, I have only alluded to a few of them above. In my youth a mere 10 to 15 years ago I
remember encountering teachers who stated that the vast majority of women could expect a
career as a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary, and only a very select few (the special ones) could
expect to go on to more traditionally male careers becoming engineers, doctors, and lawyers. It
has become increasingly clear to me that if women are ever to become equal to men in our
society they must follow the radical approach and be allowed to redefine themselves and their
role in society -- the only way they will ever achieve equal opportunity within society is to first
become equal partners in the design and structure of our society.

i This example was taken from the assignment sheet of 32.236.

ii The major source of said money is from the federal and provincial tax base. This example was
also taken from assignment the above mentioned assignment sheet.
iii"Ignoring" to the degree that giving birth is not considered a accomplishment that requires
strength or endurance, at least not in the sense that mothers are considered strong or vigorous
from the experience. Whereas a man who lifts a heavy object is perceived as strong and virile by
an observer. It should also be noted that it is unfair to compare upper body strength between men
and women as women are limited by their biology.
iv I must come to terms with the inescapable fact that Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth was an
amazingly powerful societal force that raised everyone's (including of course mine) awareness
about societal pressure on women to be thin.
v Some felt much more than a mere urge and actually felt compelled to diet once they broke 100
lbs.
vi Or perhaps women and men could invent sporting events for women and men!
vii The source of this idea is in the recommended readings on affirmative action in Radcliffe-
Richards.
viii To name only a few professional sports of which women are shut out.
ix At the present time, we may not be capable of deciding which sports are truly this way given
the underdevelopment of the female athlete as a whole.
x Radical Feminism as elucidated in class by Professor Glass is my sole formal source for radical
ideas.
xi Although this idea has occurred to me independently of this course it behooves me to cite
class lectures on Radical feminism.