Sports and gender

Speaking about gender, why can we say sport is a reflection of our society?

It has always been inequality between social classes and more about gender equality.

Women used to be considered as weaker than men because of the tradition or state of mind. But this way thinking is in march to change and to improve even if a lots of issues are still ingrained.

One of these inequalities between gender, is the sport and his female integration.

Could the society affect the way of thinking in sport?

Today society is evolving and women are becoming more and more the equal of male.

They’re improving their rights and their consideration in front of the society.

And this can be seen and represented in sports. The female sport is much more important in the media, a lots of women team are increasing, and this in sports considered like male sport. This year 125 000 women were football license holder contrary to 59 000 in 2011(LCI).

They also are moving up to an elite practice of their sport.

However, lots of inequalities are persistent in the sport in different part of it.

First, the financial aspect show us that women athlete are less paid than male athlete for the same performance. In the Top 100 of the most paid athlete only one women is represented ( Serena Williams), this is the consequences of the media representation. Women has not the same media covering than men, because it’s said that female sport makes less audience that men sport.

When can relate it with the usual case of everyday work, women are unfairly less paid than males for the same work. Also the GMMP( Global Media Monitoring Project) show that from 2015 the female media representation has stagnated. Women are less and bad represented in the media.

About the female athlete media covering we can say that they are never or really rarely presented in their uniforms or playing their sport contrary to male athletes. This can be explain by the fact that media wants to show that high level female athlete aren’t necessarily lesbian as if it was to reassure people. This is why they’re presented in sexy clothes or with their husband, boyfriend, children. This is kind of a society problem that impact this because at the age homosexuality wasn’t taking part of the mores and today it’s already difficult for people to accept it and more in sport witch is represented like an manly strength demonstration.

Finally, we can say that economical, media and way of thinking aspects about the society are reflected in sports in general, inequalities are still available even if some aspects could be a boost, many of them are acting like a brake to preserve the old state of mind.

Do you think that LFL (female NFL equivalent) is really a good exemple about women representation in sports ? And would we manage to go through every old inequalities at least in sports ?

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