The Wall_Spring 2023_Issue 9

Jasmine Dent, (she/her), S10, passionately highlights the incessant need for gender equality in all sports.

and insults.What is that supposed to mean?Why should I be offended when someone tells me I run like a girl? I run like a girl, because I am a girl!Why should that be insulting, is it any worse than running like a boy? And of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list.The list is endless!

When talking about gender equality in sport we say we are moving forward; we say that we are becoming a society built on the foundations of equali ty, but are these just empty words? There is much research still needed into this topic and the reality of gender equality in sport is shocking.We claim that we are a society striving to be a place of equality, but when seeing an array of images of men as plumbers and women as secretaries, it is hard to believe that we have made much progress. Gender inequality in sport has its roots deep in the past, growing mostly from theVictorian era.This was a very misogynistic period; a period in which sport was viewed uniquely as a masculine activity and more than 100 years later, we have barely moved on from this idea. Even in a small way, I have experienced these stereotypical views already, in the same way as so many other girls have and will.Across many schools, boys have had better equipment for things like cricket, using hard balls and wooden bats and stumps and playing on the school fields, dressed in their cricket whites.Whilst the girls have to make the most of a small sports hall or a small pitch of Astroturf, with plastic bats, tennis balls and stumps that blow over in the wind! These stereotypes hide in plain sight, popping up in things we see every day, for example on television. In the film ‘Grease’ and the more modern TV show ‘Glee’, all the girls are cheerleaders whilst all the boys battle bravely in American football which ends with battered faces while the girls dance provocatively in tiny skirts. However, the stereotypes are especially loud when it comes to sport. When you research “Table Football”, there are always male figurines playing competitively. If you modify the search to look for “Table Football with girls”, the results are bright pink or have players resembling Barbie Dolls. Even in our everyday speech, phrases like ‘you run like a girl’, ‘you throw like a girl’ and ‘you cry like a girl’ are ingrained in our general vocabulary to be used as jokes

In a physical sense, women naturally must work harder than men as they have less muscle in their upper body than men. For example, on the same course, a male golfer would only need 60% of his strength to hit a golf ball 200 metres, whereas a female golfer would have to use 80-90% of her body strength to hit the same shot. Women are also statistically more prone to knee and shoulder injuries, because of the difference in how a women’s body is structured.Women have a larger pelvis and also have less

This culture is out-dated, and we need to fix it now.

A clear result of this out-dated culture can be seen in the salaries of female and male athletes that highlight

Artwork: Sienna Harriss, LVI

this discrepancy and stereotypes evident in our society.According to the website ‘business insider.com’, the highest earning tennis player - Novak Djokovic - makes almost 13 million dollars in prize money alone, whereas the highest earning female player - SerenaWilliams - receives only 4 million dollars.That is a colossal difference!What is it that Djokovic does that is so much better than Serena, that means he should get THREE times the prize money she receives? Paribas Open, Raymond Moore, the Tournament CEO, said that women:“Ride the coat-tails of the men” and that they should “Get down on their knees and thank God for men’s players like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal”. Something that makes this statement so worrying, is that a man, who is so high up in what is a major sport, believes that he has the authority to say such things and the power to influence so many people. As recently as 2016, at the BNP

muscle mass on the higher end of their body.They are also more likely to suffer from “whip-lash” compared to male athletes, therefore making sports - like Formula 1 racing, for example - much more dangerous. Female athletes have double the injury risk compared to men, yet they got to where they are today by fighting through these differences and disadvantages. It is the women of today who inspire us for example: the Lionesses leading England to victory this summer, SerinaWilliams returning to championship matches after motherhood, or Katrina Johnson - Thompson who determinedly kept running despite injuring her Achilles in the 2020 Olympics and there are so many more.These are the women who inspire young girls, these are the women help us push through any sexism we face. We should not let sexism and old gender stereotypes get between our future female athletes and the finish line to their careers.

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