Gender Inequality in Athletics | Teen Ink

Gender Inequality in Athletics

December 11, 2015
By Anonymous

 Gender inequality has always been an issue in all levels of athletics high school, college, and professional. Male athletics -athletes and coaches- have always received more opportunities, better pay, more media attention, etc. then female athletics.

Basketball at Petal High School was never the most important sport in Petal but people, students came to games. The girls play at six o’clock and the boys play at seven o’clock after the girl's game and as seven o’clock got closer the number of people in the gym increase. More people came to the boy's game because “it’s more exciting, competitive, intense” in other words because dunks, more blocked shots. More times than not the girls game would be the better game, but because of athletic ability more people came to the boys game in hopes of seeing somebody get dunked on or somebody's shot get sent into the bleachers and not on the quality of the game. It’s the same situation at all levels of play college and professional, more people go Men’s games than the Women’s game so the men make more money than the women teams making men teams “more important” than the women teams. “Male athletes receive 55% of NCAA college athletic scholarship dollars leaving only 45% allocated to women. (NCAA 2014)” (womenssportsfoundation.org) More people come to men’s college games so the men’s colleges coaches make more money than women’s coaches. According to the New York Times website North Carolina’s Men’s basketball coach, Roy Williams, is paid three times as much as Sylvia Hatchell, North Carolina’s Women’s basketball coach, who earns $514,718. There is also a huge pay gap between WNBA players and NBA players according to CNN the average salary for a WNBA player is $72,000, while the average salary for an NBA player is around $5 million about 70 times what the average female basketball player makes.

Women sports are not equal to Men sports from high school all the way to the professional level. Men’s sports get more attention than Women’s sports from the media, just people in general and that’s easy to see when you’re watching espn. Men’s athletics is talked about more than women’s athletics, if mentioned at all. Next time you are watching espn count how many times something to do with women’s athletics is mentioned verses how many times something to do with men’s athletics is mentioned and you see which gets the most attention.



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