Gender inequality existsin varying degrees in all fields in society, and sport is no exception. Last month at the Madrid Open, Coco Gauff, a US professional tennis player, was warming up on the least desirable practice courts when she saw some unknown male players on the much better courts. Despite being a grand slam champion and ranking third in the world, Gauff was arranged to warm up on the least desirable courts because of her gender. The incident is an example of gender inequality in today’s sports world—more nuanced but still prevalent.
Tracing back to1896, Pierre de Coubertin, initiator of the modern Olympic movement, claimed that women should be barred from the Olympics because they are “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.” Thanks to the improvements towards reaching gender equality in the past decades, more women now have the opportunity to participate in sports. However, female athletes still face numerous obstacles. Among all, three issues stand out as the most prominent: pay disparity, biased media coverage, and sexism.
A significant challenge faced by female athletes is pay disparity. Since 2004, the gender pay gap has sat between 80 percent and 84 percent,which has remained unchanged for over a decade. On February 7, 2022, after 16 years, the China women’s national soccer team once again won the Asian Cup, while the men’s national team recently lost the World Cup qualifiers. However, the bonuses awarded didn’t match the results. These femaleplayers were being paid only ten percent of what their male counterparts were making. This large pay gap underscores gender inequality. Even though female players bring more honor and glory for their country, they are treated less favorably. Despite achieving nothing, Chinese male soccer players earn much more. In recent years, the US national soccer teams are actively working on addressing this issue, and some progress has already been made. In September 2023, the US women’s national soccer team and men’s national soccer team signed the historicCollective Bargaining Agreements, ensuring equal pay. This agreement helps reduce gender inequality and may inspire other countries to follow suit. Given the difficulty of making changes in the commercial field, it is effective to start from the institutional level.
Not only football, pay disparity exists in other sports, such as basketball and golf. According to Julian Jappert, director of Think Tank Sport et Citoyenneté, “the average salary of a female WNBA player was 110 times less than that of a male NBA colleague.” This striking statistic highlights the inequality faced by female athletes and the difficulty of addressing it. Despite achieving excellence, female athletes still earn significantly less than male athletes. Akey reason for pay disparity is that male athletes receive more sponsorship than female athletes. A lack of attention to women’s sports is another reason, as the media tends to meet spectator demand.
Biased media coverage hampers the growth of women’s sports. Many people may have a hard time understanding why even some women’s sports teams, such as the Michigan women’s softball team, are more widely known than men’s teams, yet they still receive less coverage. In 2021, YouGov interviewed 25,000 people from 13 countries to find the reasons. Forty percent believe that they are more inclined to watch men’s sports mainly because female athletes receive less media attention. Twenty-seven percent state that it is hard to findwomen’s sports events on TV. This report reveals that low media coverage leads to low visibility of women’s sports. The media tends to satisfy spectators’ preferences, while more audiences favor men’s sports due to their more competitive nature. As a result, in catering to spectator demand, there is more sponsorship for men’s sports and, thus, more coverage for both men’s sports events and male athletes. Therefore, men’s sports dominate the TV screen, while women’s sports remain relatively unnoticed.
Undeniably, the media coverage of female athletes has improved greatly over the last few years because of the attention given to the issue of gender inequality. However, the progress made is far from enough. In October 2023, a study conducted by The Collective, Wasserman’s women-focused practice found that women’s sports now make up 15 percent of total sports media coverage. However, men’s sports constitute 85 percent. Thereis still a substantial difference. The limited presence of women’s sports on TV reduces the public’s exposure to the performances of female athletes, which results in lower levels of awareness about them. Hence, the sports world needs to make efforts to ensure equal media coverage.
Furthermore, sexism still exists, which can severely affect the performance of female athletes. There are strict restrictions on female athletes’ body image and clothing behaviors at sporting events. For example, female athletes usually do not enjoy the right to dress freely because of the risk of others taking inappropriate photos of them. At the 2021 European Beach Handball Championships, the Norway women’s beach handball team players were fined 1,500 euros for wearing “thigh-high elastic shorts,” deemed as “improper clothing.” This was a protest against the “bikini bottoms design” of the European Handball Federation. According to the International Handball Federation rule book, female athletes must wear bikini bottoms “with a close fit” and “side width of no more than four inches.” This rule requires female athletes to wear uncomfortable clothing, which may affect their competition performance. The rule book fails to explain why women’s athletic uniforms must differ from men’s. The sport world needs to stop discussing female athletes’ clothing and set rules to ensure that factors like this will not hinder female athletes’ performances. Creepshot is not the fault of female athletes, and asking them to make a sacrifice for other people’s improper actions is an example of sexism.
In conclusion, female athletes are still facing inequalities of different kinds, which include but are not limited to pay disparity, biased media coverage, and sexism. Despite significant progress, gender inequalities still exist in the sports world. We still have a long way to go.