I partake in a dance team- a high school dance team that is dominated by all females as of now. Our team has been to state consecutively for exactly twenty years now. Each year we have worked our tails off, gotten to sections, and made it to state. More than that, we make it to finals almost every year for our kick routine. Our jazz team, this year has made it to finals at state for the first time in 10 years. This may not sound amazing but for a small-town school like ours, even going to state is something to be immensely proud of. Now for my school’s other sports, usually, when I walk down the hallway where my school's trophy cases stand I see the dance team’s trophies abundantly more than any other. Now don’t get me wrong my school has plenty of talented athletes. The point isn’t that our dance team is successful, the point is that we get little to no recognition for it. I could even go as far as to say we aren’t seen as a sport by some. I think the reason behind that is that dance is seen as “too” feminine to be a sport. Lots of women in sports face this same pesky problem, being treated/being seen differently from other more male-dominated sports and or not getting any sort of recognition for succeeding. This means women get very wrongly treated in athletics. This comes in many different forms. One of those forms is happening in the workforce with professional athletes. Whether that's issues with payment or just getting perceived as completely different from the male version of that specific sport. Another inequality that is happening is happening in the media like how women don’t get nearly the same amount of coverage. A controversial topic about females in sports is whether or not transgender women should get to play them. As this shows, women get very mistreated in sports in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons.

My first point is just how women are treated in general. When girls play sports they are way more likely to be objectified and sexualized by just playing their sport. Some sports get more sexualized than others, like people (especially men) pay attention more to what the athlete is wearing than the game that's going on. According to “The Sexualization Of Women In Sports Extends Even To What They Wear” by Sharon Pruitt-young, MPR news 2021, the Norwegian women's handball team was refusing to wear the bikini bottom shorts that they were supposed to, by wearing spandex shorts instead as a form of protest. After doing this each athlete was charged a fine of $175 all because they didn’t want to wear the tiny shorts. This started because when they requested to get different shorts they were completely ignored. This kind of extra attention towards the female body can easily lead to eating disorders for some of these women. Because when your body is such an important part of the game for some, you become more aware of your body and worry about how it looks more. In a study found by NEDA of D1 NCAA athletes over one-third of the female athletes had signs and symptoms of anorexia nervosa. Eating disorders hope “eating disorders in athletes,” says that 45% of women athletes have eating disorders. Male athletes can also get eating disorders, 19% of male athletes have eating disorders. So while males can obtain an ED, women (and especially in sports) get them for different reasons. With females, the people they play against judge their bodies as well as the audience, and sometimes their bodies are a factor in whether or not it's getting watched. So there are a lot of ways woman athletes are mistreated, one of the biggest treatment inequalities is how female athletes get paid.

Secondly, women getting underpaid in sports is another very large issue in women's sports. There is a big wage gap between women in sports and men in sports. One example of many is, the WNBA compared to the NBA, according to “WNBA Versus NBA” by Jacob Spradlin the average pay of a WNBA player is $78,000. The highest amount of money that a player on the team makes is $110,000. This is a very big difference from the NBA. The NBA’s average salary is $6.4 million and the largest number of money a player makes is $34.7 million, nowhere near the highest paid WNBA player. There is a reason for that however and the reason is that it is all about who is watching. The NBA gets a whole lot more attention than the WNBA, that aspect makes sense. But according to “Pay disparity between NBA, WNBA is a numbers game” From Deseret news by Doug Robinson on April 7th, 2021, Kelsey Plum an athlete in the WNBA says, “I’m tired of people thinking that (we) players are asking for the same type of money as NBA players ... we are asking for the same percentage of revenue shared within our CBA. NBA players receive around 50% of shared revenue within their league, whereas we receive around 20%.”. Means what they want isn’t the same pay as their male counterparts but just for a fair amount of the revenue to go towards their CBA. There isn’t necessarily a good reason behind why this is happening. The WNBA consists of some of the most talented female players across the world, so why is the wage gap so big? This shows how talented female athletes are treated, as a whole. A platform where this is commonly talked about is in the media, news media, sports media, etc.

Next, is the influence that the media/men in media have so things like tv shows, movies, and professional sports. According to the movie buff, a website that analyzes movies and tv shows, women have only a whopping 4 percent of all sports media coverage, meaning men have the remaining 96 percent. So that includes things like movies, tv shows, and written things as well like articles. A big factor in this is males dominating sports as a whole but specifically in media coverage. The main viewers of sports are men, so they want to watch and support men's sports. This makes sense but because a lot of fans are men the media cares less about the coverage of women's sports. According to the article “Gender in Televised Sports News and Highlights Shows, 1989-2009”, men’s sports received 96.3% of the airtime while women’s sports got only 1.6%. This lack of coverage/airtime makes people believe that women's sports aren’t as entertaining as men's. In the article “Why are men's sports more valued than women” they quoted something Cheryl Cooky an associate professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Purdue University said, “Men’s sports are going to seem more exciting, They have higher production values, higher-quality coverage, and higher-quality commentary… When you watch women’s sports, and there are fewer camera angles, fewer cuts to shot, fewer instant replays, yeah, it’s going to seem to be a slower game, [and] it’s going to seem to be less exciting.” So that shows just how influential what the media shows is to effect how much women's sports get watched. Another thing that is discussed among media is whether or not non-cis women have advantages over cis women even after years of surgeries and suppressing testosterone.

Lastly, another topic that is wildly discussed in women's sports, do transgender women have unfair advantages over cis-gender women? According to “Legislative Tracker: youth sports bans by Freedom for all Americans”, there are nearly 30 states that have proposed or created bills that restrict trans individuals from playing school sports. The reasoning behind this is that people think that transgender women still have lots of things like testosterone (gives larger muscle mass ect.) and hemoglobin (increases endurance). But as these women take testosterone suppressors the testosterone will be down to normal cis-female levels within just a couple of weeks. According to “Do Trans Women athletes have advantages” by Tricia Ward where Joanna Harper is interviewed, Harper says “95% of cisgender women have testosterone below 2 nanomoles per liter. And in a recent study of nearly 250 trans women, 94% of them had testosterone below 2 nanomoles per liter.” This means that a majority of trans women have the same amount of testosterone levels as cisgender women. For hemoglobin, it takes a bit longer to go down than testosterone, with a couple of months. Being worried that sports will be unfair makes sense, but as long as transgender women are at the same levels as cisgender women there usually wouldn’t be anything to worry about. Though there are other things to look at, this kind of thing varies from sport to sport for example according to “Trans women retain a 12% edge in tests two years after transitioning, study finds”, by the guardian says that a study published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine says that after two years trans women performed a 1.5 mile 12% faster then cisgender women. This proves the speculation that there may be some advantages that as far as research shows are uncontrollable. So, each sport needs to be looked at differently but permanently banning athletes is not the way to go. Another way to not go, underpaying athletes.

In conclusion, women are discriminated against in sports in lots of ways and there is still a lot of gender inequality to face and solve in sports, from school sports like my dance team and all of the other high school sports that girls participate in, to professional sports with professional athletes. Some of these issues I covered; The media and its influence on athletes and fans of athletes/teams, women not getting as much coverage as the males in the same field get, transgender women facing issues that cis-gender women don’t have to worry about, and the issue of women athletes not getting paid nearly as much as the males playing the same sport. Though women's sports have seen less discrimination than in the past, it is still shockingly bad. So, after learning all of this information, what do we plan to do about it? Women athletes should not have to continue to be discriminated against and degraded when we are just trying to do the thing we love just like male athletes.