Gender Discrimination Faced by Female Athletes on Sports
Sports, if defined based from the dictionary will mean as “a contest or game in which
people do certain physical activities according to a specific set of rules and compete against each
other” but it seems that the physicality of the game, their opponents and the rules aren’t the only
challenges faced by female athletes when it comes to their specific area of mastery. What people
see more often on television are women’s indoor and beach volleyball events which I assumed
became appealing to the public because of their provocative uniforms, their microshorts or skorts
that reveal much of their beauty were subject to male gaze. This is not far from what Laura
Mulvey had on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema which was about scopophilia, “[Freud]
associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and
curious gaze. On Filipino Television channels, we seldom see broadcasts of other female sports
event even if its male counterpart is very popularized here in our country, very good example
would be the 3-on–3 PBA league for women’s. According to Pederson(2002) the media is one of
the most influential forms of socialization in today’s society in generating gender values. From
televisions up to live stream on smart phones and laptops indeed, the mass media plays a
significant role in the transmission of gender differences and inequality. Media being selective of
what should appear on the screens of their viewers is a hindrance from the progress our female
athletes are trying to achieve in popularizing their certain field. This paper would tackle what are
the main reasons why women’s sports are still struggling its way towards popularity even it has
experienced development on sports programs through the years. What effects the gender
inequality bring to women would also be discussed in this paper.
If we’d look deeper on the definition of sports, leading researchers such as Messner (1988)
and Rowe and Brown (1994) have elaborated on the idea that the sports realm remains a site
Commented [CJS1]: Media [
ORGANIZATION:
—INTRO—
—BODY—
1. history of sports as male-dominated
2. lack of media coverage for women (non-marketability – economic
explanation)
3. fear of the “masculine” female athlete (psychoanalytical
explanation)
4. media itself as male-dominated area (issue of writers)
5. objectification of female athletes (what few representations
there are, sexist pa talaga)
—CONCLUSION—]
where gender inequality is accepted as the norm. Patriarchal values which have historically been
associated with sport are continually reinforced by the media.(Stevens-Gupta 2012) Back then,
women were expected to be unaggressive, timid and graceful hence putting them on events such
as gymnastics and ice skating. The patriarchal structure of the media controls them and restricts
female athletes from having equal rights as to male athletes. “Krane, Choi, Baird, Aimara, and
Kauer (2004) highlighted that Western culture is the embodiment of masculinity and that the
feminine ideal body contrasts with the idea of what it means to be a female athlete. In particular,
the authors stated that sportswomen live in two distinctly separate cultures, the sporting culture
and their larger culture where they must deal with the continual clash between being an athlete
and a woman.(Trolan 2013)” This is an important concept within the sport and media context
because sports has traditionally been regarded primarily as a male territory.
Duncan and Hasbrook (2002) argue that the media works as a social organization in
helping to perpetuate negative stereotypes of female athletes and as a powerful patriarchal
institution that is largely owned and controlled by men.(Stevens-Gupta 2012)
Sport sociologists Messner and Cooky (2009) state that televised coverage of women sports has
dropped precipitously from what it was twenty years ago and sports news is still being delivered
almost exclusively by men. Cultural theorist Stanley Deetz views multinational corporations
such as General Motors, AT&T, IBM, Time Warner, Disney and Microsoft, as the dominant
force in society. According to Deetz, 90% of mass media which includes newspapers, broadcast,
etc., are owned by just a handful of corporations and have a huge influence on what people see,
hear, and read. Women constitute approximately 50% of the work force in the United States but
their political power as decision makers within society and the mass media has been limited.
According to Lorber (1993), “The overall status of women and male athletes is an economic,
political, and ideological issue that has less to do with individual physiological capabilities than
with their cultural and social meaning and who defines and profits from them.”
Who is responsible for the marginalization of women’s sports in the media? A recent
racial and gender report card by the AssociatedPress (Lapchick, Moss, Russell, and Scearce
2011) of more than 320 media websites and major newspapers, revealed that the majority of
people holding positions in sports departments are white and male. In fact, 94% of sports editors
are men (97% are white) and 90% of assistant sport editors are men (85% are white). It makes
sense, men would possibly want women to excel in sports but should not be greater than what
men achieve because it would be crushing their pride as men. According to Sandoz and Winans
(1999), “the pressures on female writers to stay safely within conventional constraints are
